Audit sheds some light on EPSO’s money woes

With the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Office experiencing major financial woes at this time, the public is questioning where all of the money has gone.
In the EPSO’s most current completed audit, which was for the year ending June 30, 2015, the findings recorded prove that answering that question may be difficult.
The audit also shows that there are multiple findings that have been reported for several years that deal with money not being accounted for.
According to the findings for the year ending June 30, 2015, “Internal control procedures over the use of fuel are not being performed. Therefore, it could not be determined whether the fuel purchases were reasonable and used for the intended purposes.”
The corrective action plan that was set to take care of this issue consisted of the sheriff ensuring that properly documented charge tickets are turned in for all fuel prices. However, the 2015 findings prove that nothing had been done to correct this problem, which was first reported as a finding in 2012.
Another finding, which initially occurred in 2013, was that “the sheriff did not maintain a list of outstanding cash bonds and bond fees collected in order to reconcile to the cash balance.” While a corrective action plan was determined, no action had been taken to fix the problem. Therefore, this finding appeared again in the 2015 audit.
Some of the more concerning findings from the 2015 audit, all of which were first found in 2014, consisted of disbursements from one fund not adding up to the amount deposited into another and time sheets being submitted and processed before the end of the payroll period.
The audit findings read, “The amount of disbursements made from the fine account to the general fund did not reconcile to the amount deposited into the general fund.” This problem also occurred when looking at the disbursements being made from the civil account to the general fund.
According to the summary of the audit, due to the fact that the civil account daily holding report did not match the civil account cash balance, “it could not be determined if civil account collections were recorded and subsequently disbursed properly.”
When it comes to the time sheets being turned in before the payroll period’s end and before the time was actually worked, the findings read, “there are no procedures in place to ensure that the time paid was actually worked.”
While the EPSO is broke, sheriff Eddie Soileau did manage to find funds in July to distribute to the district’s public defender office from the bond fee account, which is required by law. One of the findings in the audit said that “the sheriff had not made distributions from the bond fee account since December of 2012.”
According to public defender Alex Chapman, the total amount of money his office received in July was $1,640. These checks were for the years 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016.
The more interesting part to this finding is that it says that “the sheriff is collecting a bond fee in the amount of $25,” but “in accordance with RS 15:85.1, the correct amount of the bond fee to be collected per bond is $15.”
While the sheriff may be catching up on making required disbursements, we will not know if he has taken care of paying the $114,953 of delinquent payroll taxes owed to various payroll taxing agencies that was reported as a finding in 2015 until the audit for the year ending June 30, 2016 has been released.
At this time, Kolder, Champagne, Slaven & Co. is still in the process of completing the sheriff’s 2016 audit.