STATE OFFICE failed to withhold contributions from judges’ salaries, auditor says.

The state auditor’s office failed to properly withhold from four judges’ salaries money to be contributed on their part to the Arkansas Judicial Retirement System from January 2015 until July 2016, an auditor told lawmakers on Thursday.

State law requires members of the retirement system’s tier-two benefit plan to pay 5 percent of their annual salary to the system, said deputy legislative auditor Jon Moore.

The auditor’s office failure to properly withhold that money resulted in an outstanding balance of $45,825 due from the four judges to the retirement system, he said.

State Auditor Andrea Lea paid the outstanding balance to the retirement system on behalf of the four judges and established a payment plan to collect the amount due from their future paychecks, Moore said during a meeting of the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee’s Committee on State Agencies.

The auditor’s office said the employee responsible for entering this information is no longer employed with the state auditor’s office.

Lea, who started serving as state auditor in January 2015, told lawmakers that “six weeks after I took office, this employee was fired for many reasons, so they are no longer with us.

“There was no reason at that time to go back and check the records until APERS [the Arkansas Public Employees Retirement System] said they weren’t balancing,” said Lea, a Republican from Russellville. The staff for the Public Employees Retirement System also administers the judicial retirement system.

“We immediately addressed it by contacting the people involved, telling them we would pay it and they could slowly pay us back and everyone was agreeable to that,” she said. “We then opened up all our records back up, went back over every single one of them, found out they were all done and moving forward. I think we’re good.”

Lea said the judges’ payment plans go through the end of their terms.

The judicial retirement system — created by the General Assembly in 1953 — is for the state’s Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals and circuit judges and has more than $200 million in investments.

The system includes 139 working members. They have an average age of 59.5, service of 17 years and salary of $160,489. The system also has 138 retired members with an average age of 75.4 and average annual benefit of $86,752 as of June 30, 2016, according to its annual report. The state paid $4.9 million to the system in the fiscal year that ended June 30, while judges contributed $1 million and court fees contributed $586,818.