County worker charged with stealing $ 109,000 in fees, deposits

A former South Florida government worker has been charged with stealing nearly $ 109,000 over two years from the Miami- Dade County Clerk of Courts office, prosecutors announced Monday.

Tyrone Derise Smith Jr., 35, has been arrested and charged with grand theft over $ 100,000 and organized scheme to defraud over $ 50,000, according to a state attorney’s office news release.

“When government employees steal, they not only grab the public’s money, but they squander the public’s trust in their local government,” State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement. “Such actions betray our community and can never be accepted or tolerated.”

Smith had been working in the New Suits Section of the Family Court Division for about 11 years when he resigned in June 2018, officials said. The clerk’s office had already started a review following the discovery of missing funds intended for deposit at a local bank.

Around the same time, a customer had complained about the lack of movement on his case, and records showed a filing fee hadn’t been paid for the case, which had been processed by Smith. The customer insisted that he had paid with cash and produced a receipt as proof, but the receipt was a fake, officials said.

Missing deposit funds and the filing fee discrepancy prompted Clerk of Courts staff to conduct an internal audit of all of Smith’s transactions between August 2016 and April 2018, officials said. Investigators reported finding 201 cases processed by Smith that appeared in the database as filed cases yet failed to show collected filing fees. The fees for those cases totaled $ 80,817. Officials said Smith also pocketed $ 28,121.16 in Clerk of Courts funds that were supposed to be deposited in May 2018.

Court records didn’t list an attorney for Smith who could comment.