The State Auditor’s Office has identified serious discrepancies in Madison County’s financial records.
“These are not minor findings. This is a big deal,” State Auditor Rob Sand said during a news conference this afternoon in his statehouse office. “…Taxpayers in Madison County deserve better.”
Auditors combed through records from a 24 month period, from June 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023. Sand said they found missing checks and unverified deposits. “There is such a mess down there in bookkeeping…we don’t know and cannot determine what was supposed to be where,” Sand said.
Madison County Treasurer Amanda DeVos was arrested early last year and has been charged with theft, fraud and feloious misconduct in office. She resigned last summer and is scheduled to go on trial this fall.
Sand said at one point auditors from his office who went to Winterset to do a cash count found 221,000 dollars’ worth of checks, cash and coins “sitting in” the Madison County Treasurer’s office and there was no proof of where more than a third of the money they saw that day came from. “Deposits were sometimes made months late,” Sand said. “At one point, there were actually 39 separate deposits totaling $4.4 million made on the same day.”
Sand told reporters DeVos also delayed or misdirected tax payments to schools, cities and other entites in Madison County. DeVos is accused of documenting that her property taxes and vehicle registration fees as paid. “And an I.O.U. was found in the treasurer’s office instead,” Sand said.
Sand’s office has forwarded its two most recent audit reports to the county attorney and the sheriff in Madison County and to Iowa’s Attorney General and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. In December, Madison County’s Board of Supervisors hired an accounting firm in Georgia to conduct future audits of the county’s finances rather than have the state auditor’s office do the work.