The Erie County Attorney’s Office failed to collect $611,000 in reimbursements owed to the county for its payments to programs that provide lawyers for poor clients who can’t afford an attorney, according to an audit by the county Comptroller’s Office.
The county department did not recognize or pursue nearly $482,000 in reimbursements owed to the county from the state, the audit concluded. It also failed to recover $130,000 paid to the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo that should have been reimbursed.
The Erie County Comptroller’s Office this year began examining how arts and cultural groups have spent millions of dollars in county grants, totaling more than $7 million a year. It found some troubling expenditures.
“The good thing is, we’re going to get back most of this money,” said Comptroller Kevin Hardwick. “We’re going to be aggressively pursuing the reimbursement that we should get. This is more than half a million dollars that would have been lost.”
The audit released this week looked at indigent legal services grants involving the county’s law department from 2015 through 2022. It found that money owed to the county from the state for two major claims was never collected because of missing or incomplete paperwork. Another case involved a claim…
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