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Audit: Floyd County Sheriff's Department didn't follow rules

NEW ALBANY, Ind. (AP) - An audit found that the Floyd County Sheriff's Department failed to comply with U.S. Department of Justice guidelines for handling particular funds, including a lack of documentation for more than $100,000 that it reportedly paid to informants.

The funds in question are part of an equitable sharing program in which the DOJ and police agencies around the U.S. share revenue from assets taken during criminal investigations, The News and Tribune reported (http://bit.ly/2aBJqpd ).

The audit by the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General comes after the sheriff's department was flagged as high risk in November because a 2012 audit found a lack of internal controls in the managing of equitable sharing funds.

An audit last fall looked at the period from Jan. 1 2012 to Sept. 30, 2015. It found that the sheriff's department received nearly $578,000 in equitable sharing funds and spent more than $890,000 during that time.

"The objective of the (2012-2015) audit was to assess whether the FCSD properly accounted for equitable sharing funds and used such revenues for allowable purposes," the report said. "Our testing revealed that the FCSD failed to comply fully with DOJ guidelines for using equitable sharing funds."

The report said that neither the county nor the sheriff's department had a written policy for handling such funds. The sheriff's department also couldn't provide records for more than $119,000 reportedly spent to pay informants.

Floyd County Sheriff Frank Loop said the department could only show receipts for nearly $5,000 of that money because the old policy under former Sheriff Darrell Mills called for investigators to destroy receipts for informants at the end of each year for confidentiality reasons.

The audit also found that the Floyd County Council transferred $11,000 from the equitable sharing fund to the general fund at one point in response to a budget emergency. Loop said he told the council at the time that it was an illegal transfer.

The county also didn't submit yearly audits on time for fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

Loop said the department has complied with the majority of the audit report's recommendations, which include writing a policy that accounts for receipt documentation.

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Information from: News and Tribune, Jeffersonville, Ind., http://www.newsandtribune.com

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