Iowa Auditor Rob Sand disputed claims made by Republican leaders that his office was aware of a coding error that led to a misallocation of court debt funds years before taking action on the issue.

Sand held a news conference Tuesday about his report on the Iowa Judicial Branch, which found that $27.5 million in court debt receipts had been misallocated due to a coding error. The report had followed up on letters sent to the auditor’s office by House Speaker Pat Grassley and Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulsen that more than $53 million of these funds had been misallocated — an amount Sand said was inaccurate.

In an October letter to Sand, Grassley wrote that the auditor’s office had been alerted of a financial irregularity by the Department of Transportation in 2022, but that these issues were not mentioned in the judicial branch audits for fiscal years 2021 and 2022.

“I am writing to gain an understanding from you as to why your office has taken no action since being made aware of these drastic issues at least two years ago,” Grassley wrote. “The State Auditor’s office exists for this very purpose. When you are made aware of misallocated funds by a branch of government, it is your duty to Iowans to investigate, alert the public, and seek to rectify the issue. Your inaction in this case is baffling and inexcusable. If there is any other explanation why it appears that the taxpayer’s watchdog was sleeping on the job, I would be very interested to hear it.”

Sand said the auditor’s office has been in contact with officials from the state judicial branch and DOT multiple times after being notified of the issue in October 2022, and that the office remained in contact with the judicial branch in conducting internal and independent investigations into the issue.

According to the auditor’s report, there were seven state funds that were under-allocated because of the error from fiscal years 2021 through 2024 — the largest being the Road Use Tax Fund, which was under-allocated by more than $10.4 million, and the Victim Compensation Fund by $7.2 million. In the same time period, the state general fund received an over-allocation of $27.5 million, in addition to the SOS Revolving Fund being over-allocated $90,174 and the Jury Witness Fund by $74,166.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird released a statement in October criticizing the auditor’s office for failing to catch the misallocation related to the Victim Compensation Fund that goes toward services like sexual assault examinations, medical reimbursements and counseling.

“No domestic violence victim should have to stay with their abuser because they cannot afford to leave,” Bird said. “The State’s self-proclaimed ‘taxpayer watchdog’ failed at the most basic job of being an auditor: conducting an audit. Crime victims should not have to worry about whether victim services will be there when they need them.”

But Sand pushed back against Bird’s characterization of the issue, saying that the underfunded government accounts never ran out of money when they were impacted by the error.

Sand asked for an apology to his staff for the criticism of the auditor’s office over this subject, and making it a “political” issue.

“I’m asking again, the people who distort the facts around this issue for political gain to publicly apologize to our staff — I would settle for a private apology to our staff that works on these issues,” Sand said. “These accountants and the auditors in this office, they work long hours. It is a difficult profession to be in right now, … Our employees know that their families and their friends are seeing these headlines, and they know that they’re doing their job, they know that they are doing good quality work. But because of these attacks, they have to deal with it. They shouldn’t have to, and they deserve an apology.”

Paulsen, speaking with reporters Tuesday, said although the funds impacted by the error retained money despite the misallocation, it does not mean services — and their recipients in the state — were not affected by the lack of funds.

“You don’t spend your bank account down to zero every month, and neither do state entities funded by court debt,” Paulsen said. “When the funds run low, you cut back and so do state entities. Have citizens been harmed? That’s a question the Legislature should ask.”

While Sand said his office has never had staff with the ability to review coding to check for problems like in this case, Paulsen said the fact the misallocation occurred because of a coding error should not have prevented the office from being able to identify the funding irregularities.

“Don’t get bogged down in thinking auditing has anything to do with coding or programming a computer,” Paulsen said. “… [I]f that was the case, that you had to understand some computer language to audit, then how does the auditor of state do a single audit? How do they go from agency to agency? … There’s still a few very small communities who use paper, but otherwise, there’s no government in the state of Iowa that doesn’t have their financials in the computer system. So if that’s a limitation, how do they … do any of their audits? And the truth is, they do, because it’s not a limitation.”

The programming errors that led to the funds misallocations were found to have likely began after changes were made to the judicial branch’s information technology system for the process for distributing judicial fees and fines to government programs in 2020 and 2021, as directed by the Iowa Legislature.

While the error has been fixed moving forward, the misallocation that occurred in previous years cannot be fixed through administrative action, although the Legislature could take action when lawmakers reconvene in January 2025.

State Court Administrator Robert Gast said in a letter Dec. 6 that the judicial branch has implemented “new programming to correct programming errors in its case management system” as of Nov. 22, 2024, including retroactive corrections to distributions dating back to July 1, 2024. It has also contracted with a third party to review programming changes made to the branch’s IT system, is working with the state auditor “to set up an engagement to review the financial findings and verify that the over and under allocation numbers and the funds impacted as calculated by JBIT are accurate” and is developing an internal process to audit future programming changes.

“The branch cannot move funds that were misallocated in prior fiscal years,” Gast wrote. “We are interested and willing to work with all court debt stakeholders to correct all misallocations from FY21 through FY24.”

A new report from environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch suggests that almost 2 million fish were killed from manure spills in Iowa between 2013 and 2023. The 179 spills occurred throughout the state, with a major hotspot for spills in the northwest corner of the state. Earlier this year, the group reported that Iowa factory farms produce more waste than any other state, at 109 billion pounds of manure annually, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

The report and accompanying map, released on Dec. 9, designated over 700 segments of Iowa water as “impaired” — not meeting the standards necessary to support aquatic life, public water supplies or recreation. Details include where in the state spills occur, who owns the operation and if they are repeat offenders.

Manure spills in the state of Iowa have contributed to what environmental advocacy groups call a water quality crisis. In the capital city of Des Moines, the local water supply has one of the world’s largest nitrate removal facilities. Nitrate is the resulting chemical of manure that is not absorbed by the soil or crops. Due to high levels of nitrate in water, which can cause blue baby syndrome in children and colon cancer in adults, the Des Moines Water Works has to run its nitrate removal system more frequently as the situation worsens — at a cost of anywhere from $10,000 to $16,000 per day, which falls entirely on utility customers.

“When you think about the nature of what they’re spilling and the quantities of what they’re spilling, it’s the difference between life and death, and people are being strapped down with medical debt and suffering in a prolonged way,” Food & Water Watch Iowa Organizer Michaelyn Mankel tells Sentient.

According to the report, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources fined 171 of the 179 offenders at $635,808 over the ten-year period it studied. That’s less than half of what Des Moines Water Works spent on its nitrate removal system in 2015, at $1.4 million. There are gaps in the state reporting as well. The total volume of the spills is difficult to determine because most reports do not contain information on how much manure is spilled. And in those that do note volume, the range is anywhere from 500 to 1 million gallons.

“The fines that the DNR has leveled against these companies do not represent restitution for the damage that they’re causing to Iowa,” Mankel says. “They also don’t represent a real demand that these corporations change the way that they’re doing business.”

In 2024 alone, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources documented 13 fish kill events, one of which regulators directly tied to animal waste. This one “anthropogenic” spill in northwest Iowa — caused by dairy manure land-applied runoff —killed anywhere from 100,001-500,000 fish.

Many concentrated animal feeding operations operate without the proper discharge permits, rendering their spills more difficult to track. In October, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a petition from 13 groups — including Food & Water Watch — calling for stricter regulation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act. Today, Food & Water Watch is calling for a “Clean Water for Iowa Act” to be passed in the state legislature. The act would require all medium and large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations to get National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits.

This report and map are released in the midst of a health crisis in the Midwest, which some observers and critics argue is tied to, or exacerbated by, large-scale industrialized agriculture. Mankel points to cancer incidence in the state of Iowa; it’s the only state in the country with rising cancer rates (though other factors, like obesity and alcoholism rates may play a role).

“We’re paying for it,” Mankel says. “I really want Iowans to understand that these problems are a policy choice, and that we are being burdened with paying the true cost of massive profits that these corporations are reaping from our state, and that’s a very intentional choice on behalf of lawmakers.”

Explore the map here.

DES MOINES, Iowa (Gray Media Iowa State Capitol Bureau) – Monday marked a day that Iowa has never had in its 178-year history: the state now has a female governor and lieutenant governor.

Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican and Iowa’s first woman to hold the job, announced that state Senator Chris Cournoyer, a Republican from LeClaire, will fill the vacant lieutenant governor position.

Adam Gregg announced on September 3rd that he was resigning from the job to become the next leader of the Iowa Bankers Association.

Cournoyer resigned as state senator Monday before getting sworn in as lieutenant governor.

Cournoyer was elected to the state senate in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. She has previously served on the school board in the Pleasant Valley Community School District and started a website development and design company.

The governor will have to choose a date for a special election to replace Cournoyer in the senate.

Copyright 2024 KTIV. All rights reserved.