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Audit of the Bristol County Division of the Superior Court Department Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An overview of the purpose and process of auditing the Bristol County Division of the Superior Court Department.

Table of Contents

Overview

In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Bristol County Division of the Superior Court Department (BCSC) for the period July 1, 2017 through December 31, 2018.

We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer and the conclusion we reached regarding the objective.

Objective

Conclusion

  1. Did BCSC take corrective measures to address the issues identified in the Office of the State Auditor’s prior audit (No. 2014-1119-3J) regarding cash received, evidence, and files within the Clerk of Courts’ Office (the Clerk’s Office)?

Yes

 

The prior audit report stated that BCSC’s “internal controls over cash received, evidence in custody, and safeguarding of case files in the Clerk of Courts’ Office [needed] improvement.”

More specifically, it listed the following issues:

  • The Clerk’s Office did not secure cash that was collected throughout the day, and it lacked segregation of duties over cash received.
  • The Clerk’s Office did not adequately safeguard evidence in its possession.
  • BSC did not have a tracking system in place to monitor the removal of case files.

To achieve our audit objective, we gained an understanding of the internal controls we deemed relevant to our audit objective by reviewing applicable laws, regulations, and agency policies and procedures, as well as conducting inquiries with BCSC’s staff and management. We evaluated the design of controls over cash received, evidence, and case files.

Cash Received

For the cash received at BCSC, we selected a nonstatistical random sample of 40 out of 374 working days within the audit period to determine the following:

  • whether BCSC safeguarded cash received by having daily cash sheets that were completed, signed by the cashier, and verified and signed by the bookkeeper or designated verifier
  • whether the receipts matched the Final Receipt Listing in MassCourts (BCSC’s case-management system); this is a report generated from MassCourts detailing the total receipts for the day
    We also selected a nonstatistical random sample of 5 out of 18 months within the audit period to determine whether monthly BCSC bank reconciliations were completed and signed by the assistant clerk.

Evidence

We selected a nonstatistical random sample of 10 out of 36 criminal cases with a status of “disposed” (meaning the case proceedings were completed) that had evidence held by the court during the audit period, as well as both of the murder cases with “disposed” status that had evidence held by the court during our audit period, to determine whether evidence in the Clerk’s Office was safeguarded. We did this by verifying that the evidence existed; the evidence was secured; and the evidence log had been updated to include type, amount/quantity, and exact location. We also verified that the evidence list in each case file matched the evidence list in the envelope or box of exhibits.

Case Files

Using a statistical sampling method and Audit Command Language software, with a confidence level of 95% and a tolerable error rate of 5%, we selected a random sample of 60 out of 2,375 case files that were active during the audit period to determine whether case files in the Clerk’s Office were safeguarded, were tracked when not located in the secured file room, and could be located.

In the cases in which we applied a nonstatistical approach, we did not project our results to the entire population.

Data Reliability

To determine the reliability of data on both BCSC’s spreadsheets of evidence and case files, we interviewed management personnel who were responsible for these spreadsheets and for the original source documents or items (physical evidence and hardcopy case files). We traced the spreadsheet information to and from the original source documents or items to validate the completeness and accuracy of the spreadsheets. We determined that the data were sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit report.

Date published: January 16, 2020

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