In a bid for more transparency around $2.9 million cash collected during arrests, the Atlanta City Council is considering an ordinance to transfer two bank accounts maintained and controlled by the police department to the city's finance department.
The funds — property and evidence — are currently not on the city's books.
"That is a concern," City Auditor Leslie Ward told Council members this week. "It's a risk area for misappropriation and possibly fraud."
Ward argued that Atlanta needs stronger internal controls over the petty cash it collects from detainees and as evidence.
Police officials stressed that none of the money has been misused, and that controls — including weekly account reconciliations and a mechanical "reverse ATM" that stores cash, provides receipts and is emptied by armored car personnel twice a week — help ensure that unauthorized staffers don't touch the money.
The amounts involved have raised eyebrows at City Hall. City Councilman Alex Wan called the accounts "slush funds," a characterization Police Chief George Turner rejected.
"Our processes account for every dime that comes into the city of Atlanta's police department," Turner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Changing oversight of the accounts is not a trivial exercise, Turner and other officials told the newspaper. The police need to be able to efficiently return property to prisoners after they are released, and that requires a near-constant churn of money.
Some police departments around the country have struggled to show that evidence and property is safe and secure. Last month, an audit of the Memphis police property room found a "significant deficiency" because employees — some unidentified — could delete information from the electronic property log.
In 2002, auditors found no misappropriation but did determine that a lot of cash was being kept in a safe. An audit in 2005 raised questions about whether staffers were using the money for departmental expenses.
If property seized during an arrest is not claimed after 90 days, the police must go to court to get a judge to release the money to Atlanta's general fund. As of April 2012, the police department's prisoner account with Wells Fargo had accumulated a balance of $1.3 million. That suggests police staff are not making timely deposits into the city's general fund, Ward said.
More visibility and regular transfers of money to the general fund "will mitigate a large share of the risk," she said.
City officials said there are already some controls. For one thing, the refunding process for released prisoners is cashless, with checks issued at the time of release.
"It is fundamentally not our money, and we can't spend it without complying with state and federal guidelines," said Hans Utz, the city's deputy chief operating officer.
Under the proposed ordinance, the accounts would be regulated and controlled by the finance department and the chief financial officer, Jim Beard. Once the funds are put on the city's books, they will appear as liabilities, not assets.
"Everybody agrees there should be more transparency," Beard said in an interview. "But everyone also understands the need for the police department ... to return property quickly and efficiently to detainees once they've been released."
About the Author