Galloway joined Prosecuting Attorney Dwight Scroggins announcing Senate Bill 176, which was prefiled in the General Assembly by Springfield Republican Sen. Bob Dixon. Galloway said the current law has no teeth, from enforcement to collection.
She said the Auditor’s Office has identified a lot of official misconduct, including here in the St. Joseph School District. The ill-gotten funds statewide total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars…
She listed a “portfolio” of audits in which they’ve seen official misconduct.
“We have seen a court clerk down Carl Junction steal tens of thousands of dollars,” Galloway said. “There was a Wright County collector that manipulated tax records to benefit her and her family. Those are just a few examples that we have found over the past couple of years since I have taken office.”
The bill would allow judges to order restitution, which Prosecutor Scroggins said makes it easier to collect.
“It clearly gives the court the authority to order restitution in these kinds of cases,” Scroggins said, “and it has a process in place wherein we can collect that in the same way that we would any of the other civil judgments we might be currently collecting, and it can be returned to the public.”
Scroggins said the decision was made early on during the local school district investigation to let the FBI take the reins, not because they are better investigators, but because they have better laws at their disposal.
Scroggins the new law would have helped local authorities during the controversy, which wound up in the hands of federal investigators.
“We did not have at that time, do not have at this time actually, very good laws on the books as to, clearly, how that can be investigaged, and clearly how that can be prosecuted,” Scroggins said. “So, the decision was made early on in that investigation to turn it over to federal authorities because their laws were better.”
The law allows local prosecutors and law enforcement officials to request the help of the auditors office, something that Galloway said is not always available now.
“This legislation will allow local prosecuting attorneys another tool, in order to hold these folks accountable to the public dollars that they have abused and sometimes lined their pockets with,” she said.
“My hope is that this will move forward swiftly because it has bipartisan support. This is a good government accountability bill, and so, if we did make it through the legislative process it would take effect in August of 2017.”