Marshall County Sheriff Matt Hassel and Chief Jailer Bo Holcomb appeared before the Marshall County Commissioner this week to explain the audit issue the State Board of Accounts noted the 2020 and 2021 audits of the Inmate Trust Accounts.
Sheriff Hassel said Stellar Financial Services is the vendor that provides commissary services to the inmates and operates the banking software for the purchase of a variety of items for personal use and consumption including tablet time and additional visitation time.
Bo Holcomb told the commissioners in late August 2020 that there was a critical error in the Stellar software server located in the jail. That service is supposed to back up to itself, back up to a thumb drive, and back up in the cloud. He said all those services failed at that one moment. Since that time the jail staff and Steller Services have been working almost every day to rebuild the entire information system that was lost using hard data they have and some data from the server that crashed.
Holcomb said, “We have worked with them (Stellar) in the last few weeks and have made some significant gains to try to produce data that proves all of the funds are owed to the sheriff.” He said, “I believe that in the next few weeks we will be able to show that those retained earnings are a discrepancy in some of the commissions that were owed to the sheriff from our tablet and phone systems.”
Holcomb said there were several complaints received from inmates that claimed they didn’t get their funds. He said, “Every single issue that we have ever come across as far as a discrepancy with an inmate with their money that I hold in trust has been taken care of, has been solved.”
Sheriff Hassel said the issue is that they have about $65,000 that they don’t know where it goes to, and part of the problem is because the computer crashed. He said with the State Board of Accounts we must explain where that money came from and to whom the money is owed.
Commissioner Kevin Overmyer asked what the Sheriff’s Department is doing to avert this problem in the future and Holcomb said, “There were things we immediately changed. The backups to the computer, I now get a report that shows the backups are working. We implemented hard data.” Holcomb also prints paper copies of the reports he needs to show the funds coming into and going out of the Inmate Trust accounts. He said those changes were implemented in 2020 after the crash.
