A recent audit of the Hart County Fiscal Court found numerous issues with operations at the Hart County Jail.

Most of the infractions cited in the state auditor’s report involved the commissary, the funds and expenses of which were kept by hand on paper receipts and documents until near the middle of 2016.

Jailer Israel Bergenson said a program that manages the commissary and all other jail expenses, originally installed about a year ago, will cut down on these issues in the future.

“Everything’s logged in the computer now and that’s cleared everything up,” he said. “I wish I had it when I first came in. I wouldn’t have gotten this audit.”

Bergenson said he took office two and a half years ago.

This is the first state audit of the jail since Bergenson took over as jailer and first time most of these issues have been brought to his attention, he said.

The fact that a two-person office staff was handling the physical receipts caused some of the specific issues cited in the audit, like invoices being paid more than once, payments of invoices being missed and the jail failing to reconcile invoices with actual commissary purchases, Bergenson said.

“You send out 10 or 15 receipts today and you send out 10 or 15 receipts tomorrow and some slip out twice,” he said.

All the specific instances of financial discrepancies pointed out in the audit, like the duplication of a $1,582 invoice and the underpaying by a collective $1,333 of three invoices, have been corrected and, with a new computer program keeping track of the jail’s finance, such mistakes will be much fewer and farther between in the next audit, Bergenson said.

In addition, Bergenson is cited in the audit report as saying that the jail staff will compare and reconcile invoices daily from now on and that either the jailer or the major will review all transactions and initial all documents.

“There shouldn’t be any more mistakes like that in the next audit,” he said.

The audit also dinged the jail for not depositing its receipts daily.

The audit quotes a response from Bergenson: “All invoices will be paid daily and signed by the secretary and approved by the Jailer or the Major, to make sure that all invoices are paid on time and never under paid.”

Bergenson said receipts will be deposited every day from now on, which, even with two people in his office staff, won’t be a problem.

“They’ve got to go to the post office every day and the bank is on the way,” he said. “The auditors want us to take care of it daily and that’s what we’re going to do.”

The audit also noted that the jail’s bookkeeper didn’t remit sales tax for electronic cigarettes and toilet paper sold in the commissary.

Bergenson said this was because he and his office staff were unaware the jail needed to submit sales tax for those two items.

Thursday, the jail paid the required roughly $7,000 payment to the department of revenue, he said.

A lack of adequate segregation of duties was cited in the audit as well.

Independent and state audits typically cite the jail’s lack of segregation of duties as an issue, Bergenson said.

“It’s on every report,” he said. “There’s just not enough staff to look at everything right.”

The only concern not involving the jail the audit laid out was that the Fiscal Court “did not properly disclose debt on the quarterly report and budget accordingly.”

Treasurer Sue Gardner said Hart County Solid Waste borrowed $164,000 and the Hart County Public Library borrowed $800,000 from the Kentucky Association of Counties.

In prior years, such transactions were not included on a list of the county’s liabilities and they had never been written up for it, Gardner said, speculating that it might be a new requirement.

Solid Waste sought the funds to finance new trucks and the library was funding renovations to its building, she said.

“To me, it wasn’t our liability,” she said. “It was Solid Waste’s and the library’s.”