York, PA - The York County Clerk of Courts Office automatically cuts hundreds of checks every month, many as restitution to crime victims.
But Clerk of Courts Don O'Shell discovered last week that not everyone due a restitution check was getting one.
O'Shell was speaking with a representative of the state office that oversees all of the Common Pleas Courts and district justice offices when he noticed a discrepancy.
According to the state, York County disbursed $9.2 million from the clerk's office last year. That money went to the state, the county's general fund and crime victims.
To O'Shell's knowledge, reports in his office said $12.7 million was collected from criminal defendants in the county in 2010. The same amount, or close to it, should have been disbursed, he said.
After some investigation, O'Shell discovered the state-mandated Criminal Court Case Management System, which was implemented to consolidate case tracking, docketing and financial accounting, was not automatically writing checks for victims listed in the system as crime witnesses.
O'Shell said Friday about $300,000 that should have been disbursed to victims instead has been counted monthly as money that was collected. He said the management system had been adding that amount each month to the money that actually was collected, leading to the apparent $3.5 million discrepancy between state and local figures.
O'Shell said his cost and fines staff systematically removed the "crime witness" identifier from the system last week and checks to the previously misidentified victims should be disbursed in April.
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