“The money has disappeared,” Byrd said in an interview at the State Capitol.
Byrd is talking about tax dollars misappropriated or misspent by local towns, and some county governments, across Oklahoma.
At least $2.1 million have been uncovered by Byrd’s office in special audits released this year as having been redirected away from localities and into the pockets of individual city managers, board members, clerks and independent contractors without authorization.
Byrd said problems are consistently related to sparse and poor leadership in tiny towns across the state. Those include places with anywhere from 150 to 6,000 people, like Braman, Wynnewood and Pauls Valley. Larger jurisdictions facing similar issues include Payne and Cleveland counties, among others.
“I think this is a systemic issue across Oklahoma,” Byrd said during an interview at her office in the Oklahoma State Capitol. “I think board members come and go, it's very hard to get board members to even serve. I know a lot of municipalities aren't operating with all board positions filled.”
And that, Byrd said, leads to a lack of knowledgeable management, oversight and eventual misspending.
Audit findings show lapses in local government leaders' compliance with Oklahoma’s open record laws. These include failures to post public meeting agendas, votes being taken at inappropriate times for new business items and the absence of official record-keeping of when certain officials were hired and how much their salaries were supposed to be. Such lapses, coupled with other administrative errors, leave openings for malpractice, Byrd said.
A June 5 audit investigating the northern Oklahoma Town of Braman revealed former town clerk Sandra Barrows was hired by the board of trustees in 2016 and served for three years without ever being assigned a salary. Barrows’ hiring does not appear in the town's public meeting minutes.
By the time Barrows was caught by her colleagues and reported to local authorities, she allegedly had forged 72 signatures of former Braman board members and paid herself $60,289 in city funds. Half of that total was in utility payments made by Braman residents to Barrows that were never deposited into the town's account.
Other local governments and their total misspent public dollars are as follows.
The state auditor is also examining the finances of the Cleveland County Sheriff’s office. Part one of this report, released earlier this month, does not state any findings.
Last fall, the Cleveland County Board of Trustees, prompted by Sheriff Chris Amason, asked Byrd’s office to review the sheriff’s general appropriations and management of cash injections, lapsed funds and reimbursements dating back to 2021.
The request came amidst disagreements among board members on how much money the law enforcement agency has been collecting, particularly in the last year.
The auditors’ first task was to tally all collections received by the sheriff’s office over the last fiscal year and see if they reconciled with the $18.3 million budget approved by the board for the 2024 fiscal year.
The board asked the auditors to focus on the dates between July 1, 2023, and Feb. 29, 2024. The auditors found that the Sheriff’s office collected $16.7 million in that time frame. Part two will include findings for the years 2021-2023 and is pending release.
For small Oklahoma towns, lost amounts in the tens of thousands account for large portions of their overall budgets. Byrd used Braman as an example.
“Braman's just a little town of little over 200 people with annual revenues of $670,000,” she said. “So what we found in the audit was that around $60,000 had been misappropriated by the town clerk. It's very concerning. It's hard for a town this small to recover whenever that much money has been misappropriated.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way, Byrd said.
The auditor’s office offers training for new local government board members to learn the tools they need to find success in their roles.
“We encourage them to reach out, and we can help them get the training they need, point them in the right direction, point them to manuals where they can learn for themselves,” she said. “Simple oversight could have prevented a lot of this misappropriation.”
But the damage revealed in audits released this year has already been done. Now comes justice, and that is outside the purview of the auditor’s office, Byrd said.
Special audits of municipalities are requested by a local governing body, law enforcement office or citizen petitions, and sometimes, they don’t uncover any wrongdoing.
But when they do, local district attorneys and the state attorney general are responsible for filing charges if and when they occur.
