In Iowa, funds paid to the courts in the form of fines, fees and penalties in criminal cases are distributed to various sources, including state funds for victim compensation, emergency services, road infrastructure, as well as county attorneys and the state's general fund.
Under the state's distribution system, clerks of courts enter court fees into a coding program that is supposed to channel those funds to the proper source. But in a statement and corresponding reports and documentation published Friday by the Iowa Judicial Branch, the courts said programming errors sent over $26.5 million in fees since 2020 to the wrong sources.
Of that total, $22.7 million went to the incorrect state funds, and $3.8 million erroneously went to non-state funds, according to the courts.
The Judicial Branch's documentation published Friday does not include a more detailed breakdown of which funding sources erroneously received funds and which were shorted.
"The judicial branch is committed to correcting these issues. It is working with all stakeholders to fix its case management system and remedy previous misdistributions," an Iowa Judicial Branch's statement said.
In its statement, the Iowa Judicial Branch said after judicial branch officials became aware of programming errors in its distribution system, two reviews were conducted: one by the National Center for State Courts, and another based on the recommendations from that group by the Iowa Judicial Branch's State Court Administration.
The programming issues arose in the 2021 state budget year after lawmakers made changes to the court fees distribution system during the 2020 and 2021 legislative sessions. The new laws in consecutive years both required programming changes to the distribution system.
According to the National Center for State Court's report, the state law changes created confusion in implementing the new coding.
"The Iowa Courts have a complex financial obligation distribution structure set forth in the Iowa Code. While such complicated structures are not unique to Iowa, recent 2020 and 2021 legislative changes and difficulty implementing updates to account for these changes to the software that manages this distribution have created concern about proper distributions," the report said.
"Although the programming is functioning as intended, the system and financial codes metadata and coding were implemented incorrectly due to complicated, retroactive, and sometimes conflicting legislation and misinterpretation of the statutes," the report added. "In addition, distributions were frequently changed multiple times throughout the years making it difficult to apply the correct logic for old versus new changes."
The report included 13 recommendations for both immediate and long-term fixes in the Iowa Judicial Branch's court fees distribution system, including recommendations for more legislative cooperation, technology upgrades and further legal review.
The Iowa Judicial Branch's information technology staff has been working to implement changes recommended in the reports, and completion is anticipated this fall, the courts said.
Over the course of the four state budget years that the programming errors was an issue, nearly $588 million in court debt was collected, according to Iowa Judicial Branch data.
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