It’s no secret that there was a problem in Carbon County’s clerk of courts office for years under the then longtime row officer, William McGinley.

On Thursday, Tyra Boni, the current clerk of courts, provided the commissioners with an update of how the office is doing with finishing the backlog and how the department is looking as she looks toward the future.

Boni, who won her first term in November 2019 after defeating Fran Heaney, who had been appointed by the state to take over the office after McGinley abruptly retired and was later charged by the Attorney General’s office, spoke about what the department has accomplished in both the criminal division and collections division over the last year.

New problems found

Under the criminal division, Boni said 45,000 unprocessed documents were discovered. Those documents were processed over a period of five months.

There were also unapplied funds in the amount of $160,000 discovered in the department’s cash bail escrow account. The funds, which get refunded to the necessary parties, was not completed since 2015, Boni said.

On the collections division, Boni said she learned that the department had been mismanaged for five years and the director of collections took a leave of absence from the office from February 2020 through the end of the year.

The new row officer found 15,000 duplicate documents that needed to be sorted and scanned into the case management system if it had not already been done so. There were also 3,200 cost sheets not processed and 1,000 returned checks sitting in a box that had not been reconciled.

After sorting through reports, Boni said it was learned that there was $1.3 million in the escrow accounts that still needed to be applied to cases or refunded if a case balance was fulfilled.

Payments and disbursements

Despite the pandemic, Boni said her office collected $1.83 million in costs, fines and restitution payments, the highest collected in the last five years.

She credits a number of changes for this accomplishment, including office procedural changes, streamlining of tasks in the offices, restructuring the department and reallocating job duties.

In addition, disbursements to victims, county and state offices and various other entities also surpassed $2.21 million, the highest amount disbursed in just under a decade.

How Carbon ranks

According to Boni, out of the 24 sixth-class counties in Pennsylvania, Carbon County ranks first in disbursements with Clearfield County the only other sixth class county to disburse over $2 million in 2020.

Because of these changes within the office, in addition to finishing filing the backlog of cases, Boni noted that the office expenses have decreased 17%, or just over $96,000.

“These are huge accomplishments contributing to the improvements of the Carbon County clerk of courts office,” she said.

Looking forward

So what’s next, Boni asked, noting that her office’s next challenge is pursuing the collection of the $25 million in outstanding funds that are owed for costs, fines and restitutions to victims, county taxpayers, county offices, the state and other entities.

Of that amount, $6.5 million is delinquent, while the remainder is either being pursued or are on payment plans.

“Our 2021 focus will be on ways to implement a successful plan of action to successfully collect on the delinquent payments, (and) to continue to reevaluate processes within the office,” Boni said as she thanked several office holders, as well as her staff.