Des Moines, Iowa — Top Republicans in the Iowa House are asking why State Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat, did not alert them or investigate a computer programming error in the state court system that improperly distributed 53 million dollars in court fines and fees.
House Speaker Pat Grassley says the Iowa DOT’s legal counsel notified State Auditor Sand about the problem two years ago, but lawmakers didn’t learn about the issue until last month. Kraig Paulsen, the governor’s budget director, says the error shorted the Victims Compensation Fund by over three-and-a-half million dollars and the state fund for maintaining and building roads and bridges failed to get deposits totalling 10 million dollars. Paulsen says Sand should have included these and other discrepancies in the last two audits of the state Judicial Branch. The House Speaker says Sand’s inaction on the issue is baffling and inexcusable. Sand says Republicans are engaging in partisan politics because the Reynolds administration has known of the issue since it began and the Auditor’s Office is the only one of the entities involved that has no power to fix the problem.
The governor’s budget director is calling on the State Auditor’s Office to audit the court system’s discrepancies. Sand says the law Governor Reynolds signed last year prevents the State Auditor’s Office from auditing IT-related issues like this. According to the governor’s budget director, state court officials have notified his office that they have no plan to recover 26 million dollars worth of overpayments to some programs and redirect that money to the proper accounts. The spokesman for the Iowa Judicial Branch is out of the office until next week and unavailable for comment.
