ERIE COUNTY, N.Y. — Erie County Comptroller Kevin Hardwick began auditing the Erie County Clerk's Office nearly four months ago. The official report found a slew of fiscal errors, missing transactions, voided fees, and mismanagement.
The audit was looking at the first and last months of 2022, just January and December. The findings raised serious questions about financial management and internal controls in Erie County Clerk Michael 'Mickey' Kearns' office.
2 On Your Side asked Kearns to explain what happened, but his office said he was unavailable. Kearns emailed Channel 2's Ron Plants a statement saying, "The comptroller and I have sent a letter alerting the Erie County Sheriff’s Office to these irregularities and requested his assistance in investigating this matter further. So as to not jeopardize the integrity of the investigation, I will have no further statement until the investigation has been concluded.”
More investigations
The audit prompted further reviews into the Clerk's Office. The State Comptroller's office is now considering a request from Hardwick that they conduct a much more in-depth forensic audit which could look further back at operations in the Clerk's office. Hardwick referred to it as a "forensic audit SWAT team". Locally the Erie County District Attorney and the Erie County Sheriff will look for any potential charges on the criminal side. Hardwick said he and Kearns jointly asked District Attorney John Flynn and Sheriff John Garcia to investigate.
"I told him (Kearns) we're looking at some huge cash discrepancies here, some significant cash discrepancies," Hardwick said. "I think everything changed. Since then, there's been nothing but cooperation," Hardwick added.
The Erie County Clerk's Office has been audited just two times in the last two decades, with the last audit occurring in 2015. Hardwick says there is no telling how far back the potential mismanagement may go.
"The money that we can't explain right now is over $90,000," Hardwick told 2 On Your Side. "They haven't been audited since 2015, so could we be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars? Yeah, there's a good chance of that," Hardwick said.
The focus of the Comptroller's audit was the Registrar Division of the Clerk's Office which collects pistol permit fees, mortgage tax fees, and court fees.
Among Hardwick's concerns is that the Erie County Clerk's Office handles millions of dollars worth of transactions every year. But Hardwick said the County Clerk's Office failed to provide records and was unresponsive when the audit began.
"[The office] didn't return the records that we were looking for in a timely fashion, and then some of them they didn't produce at all," Hardwick said.
Again Hardwick emphasized that changed after his personal meeting with Kearns.
Among the audit's key findings:
- The Registrar's Office had 28 transaction discrepancies that totaled $13,860.
- The Clerk's Office management gave cashiers "blanket permissions" to record, receipt, void, adjust, and waive a fee transaction with no oversight.
- The Clerk's Office "unlawfully" waived pistol permit fees in 2022.
- Multiple divisions' fees "did not reconcile."
"I think we would wish it were simple accounting errors," Hardwick said. "I think that we suspect that it's a lot more than that, and the fact that law enforcement is involved now, I think, is telling."