Constable system faces audit
A Berks County constable escorts an inmate.
A group of Berks County leaders has shown interest in addressing problems in the constable system highlighted in a series of stories published in the Reading Eagle, a sister newspaper of The Mercury. But first, they said, the officials involved in the discussion need to get on the same page.
And that begins with a forensic audit of county taxpayer-funded system.
“We met several times and have come to the conclusion that unless there’s a unified forensic audit we’re not going to be able to figure out how much the system is costing the county,” said county Commissioners’ Chairman Christian Leinbach. “This is being done because of the near impossibility of determining, with any certainty, the full charges and revenue that is generated from the constable system.”
Commissioners voted at their weekly meeting Thursday to authorize county solicitor Christine Sadler and county chief administrative officer Ronald Seaman to take steps to name a firm to engage in a forensic audit of the constable system.
The decision to hire an outside firm was prompted
by a series of stories published in the Reading Eagle nearly a year ago that revealed taxpayers in Berks are paying far more than those in any other Pennsylvania county to subsidize constable pay in a single municipality — with an estimated $400,000 in taxes going to pay constables working out of Reading in 2017.
The system is designed to levy server fees on offenders to repay the system, but when those repayments fall short, taxpayers are left to cover the costs.
The estimated $400,000 gap in Berks was by far the largest in the state calculated by the newspaper using data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.
The stories spurred calls by several top officials for the public disclosure of a county reimbursement figure sought by the newspaper. But the newspaper could not get an answer when it approached or emailed at least six county and court system leaders and staffers and filed a Right-toKnow request, trying to find out how much money the county got back.
Leinbach said he soon discovered that a definite answer could not be found in the hybrid system involving the state courts, county government, multiple types of constable work and offenders who may pay fees years late or never.
That is why, he said, a forensic audit is needed to find the answer.
“This is not being done as a challenge or attack on any one group,” he stressed. “We had been waiting to see if we could get the numbers internally, but it became clear that we needed to bring in an outside firm to help us gather all the information that we needed to move forward in this discussion.”
Leinbach said his hope is the audit will reveal the true costs of the system. Knowing the true cost, he said, will help the county decide if the system is effective in relation to its cost to taxpayers.
It could also help the county decide whether to support legislation proposed by state Rep. Barry Jozwiak, a Bern Township Republican, that would eliminate Pennsylvania’s elected constables through attrition and transfer their work to county deputy sheriffs.
“Until I have the data, it’s hard for me to believe that you get rid of constables and save money across the board because they pay for everything on their own,” Leinbach said. “But if you don’t have good data, you can’t make good decisions.”