A recently released audit of the Holts Summit municipal court detailed previous accounting and record-keeping errors, some of which resulted in warrants being issued to people for failure to appear in court over fines that had already been paid.
Holts Summit City Clerk Hanna Lechner said the city has adopted the procedures recommended in the audit and addressed the problems caused by the errors. Most of the issues occurred in 2017 under a previous clerk who no longer works for Holts Summit, she noted.
Lechner said 10-15 warrants were issued incorrectly, stemming from city staff using manual paper receipts for fine payments that were never added to Missouri's online court records system, JIS, making it seem like they had not been paid.
The audit, conducted by Kris VanderVeen, a deputy circuit court clerk in Cole County, reported the manual receipt books from November 2016 through July 2017 were missing.
"There was no documentation that said that this person had paid their fine, so they were still in file cabinets to either be paid, on a payment plan and just we had no documentation," Lechner said. "And then we sent out a couple warrants for people who failed to appear at court."
One person was arrested through the warrants, who originally had received and paid a fine for running a posted stop sign. The payment had not been added to the online system. Lechner said the person was released once the error was discovered, and Holts Summit sealed the arrest and contacted Missouri Highway Patrol to remove it from the person's record.
Most of the other cases where a fine payment had not been recorded properly were resolved once the people contacted the city or brought in their paper receipt.
The person who was arrested had moved, Lechner said, so they did not receive the notice of a new court date or the summons leading up to the warrant.
"After this happened, we went through all of our warrants that we had and we recalled all of them, so the city of Holts Summit did not have warrants on the books for like 21/2 months," Lechner said. "And so we literally went in each case, document by document, trying to find out what had happened. There was just a lot of loose ends, a lot of paperwork that was missing, a lot of dockets that were not entered correctly, and stuff like that."
Holts Summit no longer uses manual paper receipts, instead using only the online records system, Lechner said.
Other issues reported in the audit included Holts Summit's using pay-by-web payments before being officially set up to process them, checks returned for not having sufficient funds remaining in the system as payment, a lack of consistency for when electronic books are closed for a month, monthly electronic statements missing an open items balance, fees applied to a case or violation not being verified, duplicate month-end payouts and input code errors during case processing.
Lechner said Holts Summit will issue summons to people who wrote checks without sufficient funds, totaling around $530.
City staff also had not used an "excess revenue" code for some traffic cases, meaning the city did not get a portion of money generated from the fine. Lechner said Holts Summit has received some of that money after the problem was noticed, with the total amount missed likely less than $2,000.
Holts Summit City Administrator Matt Harline said the city is not aware of any funds missing. The city recently did a complete reconciliation of its accounts and likely will pay for an audit later this year.
The revenue generated by municipal court fines last year is in line with previous years, Harline added, so the city believes the problems have been corrected.
Mayor Landon Oxley said he is satisfied with the staff's work to bring the municipal court back into working order.
"It's unfortunate that this happened, but (Lechner) feels very confident and so does (Harline), and so that makes me feel confident that this situation is taken care of," Oxley said.