Inspector General Jeff Shapiro dropped his final report on county sheriffs’ spending Monday morning and it hit Beacon Hill with a thud, and blame to go around.
The sheriffs’ budget process is “chaotic with chronic underfunding and illegal overspending,” Shapiro’s office said. Problems stem from a “lack of a common understanding of the role of the sheriffs’ offices,” with some legislators seeing their role as narrow and some of the elected sheriffs possessing a more expansive view.
“How we got to this point no longer matters. Sheriffs’ offices have been Commonwealth agencies for more than 25 years. It is time for the chaos to stop,” Shapiro said in a statement. “The lack of a common understanding among sheriffs, lawmakers, and the Executive Office of Administration & Finance (A&F) on such foundational ideas as the role of the sheriff, what the state covers for mandated programs, how funds derived from civil process are to be handled, along with the common understanding that the sheriffs’ General Appropriation is not sufficient and supplemental funding is all but guaranteed has resulted in uncontrolled spending with little to no oversight. To put it in sheriffs’ terms, it’s a bit like the wild west.”
Responses to Shapiro’s preliminary report gave him optimism that all parties involved agree on the need for change, but “solving the budget issues and eliminating deficit spending is a multi-year effort,” he said.
Shapiro said civil process fees and expenditures operate outside state controls and laws governing civil process are “out of date and needlessly complex.” The Executive Office for Administration and Finance allows sheriffs “to transfer funds out of their payroll account to use for other expenses with the knowledge that such offices are operating at a deficit,” the report said, and the state comptroller “allows the sheriffs’ payroll to continually run into a deficit to meet state labor law without being brought into the positive before the next payroll run.”
In a letter with his report, Shapiro identified his “biggest concern” as the use of private bank accounts outside of the oversight of the state Treasury and comptroller, with the report flagging 120 accounts that together had more than $42 million of expenditures during fiscal 2025 and held balances of over $36 million at the close of that fiscal year, which ended with an “historic combined deficit of $110 million” for the state’s sheriffs.
Lawmakers this month are negotiating a final annual state budget that may include Shapiro’s recommended separate line items to address different elements of sheriff spending, from operations to free calls for inmates to medication-assisted treatment and collective bargaining.
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