An audit report earlier this year showed that the Coahoma County Chancery Clerk’s Office was up to six months behind in recording the minutes from meetings conducted by the Coahoma County Board of Supervisors.
While there is no specific penalty for the failure to record the minutes, the president of the state clerk’s association and the longtime county chancery clerk said the minutes should be completed within a 30-day window.
Carolyn Parham, who is in her first four-year term as the county chancery clerk, blamed the delay on the implementation of a new staff in the clerk’s office and additional duties that her office handles.
When questioned Tuesday, Parham said she had already caught up with three months and the rest of the minutes should be in the proper books at the county courthouse by the end of the day Friday.
“They will definitely be in the book by the end of the week, by Friday,” Parham said Tuesday.
The matter first came up when Ricky Churchwell, an accountant with the Ellis & Hirsberg accounting firm in Clarksdale, provided an audit to the Coahoma County Board of Supervisors in January that said the minutes from March through October 2018 were unavailable for review.
As of Tuesday, the minutes were recorded in the books through June 2018. The minutes from July 2018 through the present day were available to be viewed, but they were not in the books as required.
Code section 19-3-27 of the Mississippi Code of 1972 annotates that the chancery clerk of the board of supervisors keep and preserve a complete and correct record of all the proceedings and orders to the board.
The audit was for the 2017-18 fiscal year and Churchwell said he talked to the chancery clerk’s office before coming to the Board of Supervisors in January and the minutes were supposed to be caught up by Christmas 2018.
“I can only speak to what was done at the time we finished the audit. I think they were pretty far behind, as the audit said,” Churchwell said Tuesday. “They were four, five or six months behind at that point and they shouldn’t be any further than a month or so behind. All efforts should be made to catch the minutes up. It shouldn’t take that long. I don’t know how far behind they are at this point.”
Churchwell did not state an opinion on what the consequences would be for the minutes not being in the books.
“That’s up to the state audit department, whether they choose to follow up on the findings,” he said. “We just report the findings. They’re the follow-up.”
Churchwell will be conducting another audit on May 19 for the fiscal year beginning Sept. 30, 2018.
The Press Register provided Logan Reeves of the State Auditor’s Office a copy of the audit, but an opinion had not been provided as of press time Wednesday.
Clarksdale City Clerk Cathy Clark, who also serves as president of the Mississippi Municipal Clerks and Collectors Association, said minutes for meetings should be completed within 30 days.
“You have 30 days to get your minutes done,” she said. “Typically, you should have them ready and prepared for the next board meeting. Within that 30 days, you should have the minutes approved and in your books.”
If the minutes are behind, she said they need to be corrected as soon as possible.
“There are not any consequences or anything,” Clark said. “They’ll just tell you, ‘You need to get it done.’”
Parham is in the final year of her first term in office and talked about some of the struggles that caused her to fall behind in recording the minutes.
“I started off with some staff that was here and I have new staff basically since I became clerk,” she said. “Two of them have only been here a year. The other one has been here three years, so I have had some struggles in showing them how to do the job and keeping up with everything – training them and trying to keep up with my part of the job, too.”
There are four employees, including Parham, who work in the chancery clerk’s office and she is looking for one more employee. She said she works 60-plus hours per week.
“I work every night late, weekends late, and we’re having to work late now to catch up,” she said. “Plus, it didn’t help when I’ve had people to be out sick during this time.”
While she has worked in the clerk’s office, Parham said this is her first time being a boss and most of the employees have never worked in a court setting. She planned to propose a contract at the Wednesday, March 20 Board of Supervisors meeting that will allow minutes to be electronically scanned in by April 1.
“I am working with the board to see about getting a program to have those minutes scanned in instead of doing them hand numbered,” Parham said. “Instead of having them hand numbered and hand doing them, they’re going to be electronically scanned in.”
The responsibilities of the chancery clerk’s office go well beyond recording the minutes.
“We collect delinquent taxes,” Parham said. “We have to send out notices for delinquent taxes. We have commitments that happen all the time that takes up a lot of the staff time. Besides the minutes, I have to settle the land redemptions after the delinquent taxes. It’s not just filing a deed, recording a deed, filing an estate and all that. It’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of phone calls collecting.”
Since becoming chancery clerk, Parham said her office has started taking credit cards and gone to an electronic scanning of court records with the Mississippi Electronic Courts system.
Now, things are getting better.
“I have a stable staff,” Parham said. “I haven’t had to hire anybody in the last year, but my first year I went through four people. Not that I let them go. They chose to leave.”
Parham said she believed politics played a role in others making a major issue of her being behind in recording the minutes.
“I’m not a dirty politician,” she said. “I’m taking the high road.”
Parham, who is running for re-election this year, did not name anyone specific she believed was playing politics.
Her opponent in the Democratic primary, Alice Foster, who is currently the county purchasing clerk, said she had no part in the question about the minutes.
“I’m so thankful that I don’t play in politics,” Foster said.
Parham said everyone in her position has fallen behind in recording the minutes, but not as many months as she is behind.
“It’s not good that I’m that far behind, but it happens,” said Parham, adding she is now doing everything in her power to get the minutes caught up to where they should be.
Parham’s predecessor, Ed Peacock, who served as chancery clerk for 20 years, said he recorded minutes after the Board of Supervisors approved them.
“I would always have the minutes either recorded or ready for recording by the first Monday meeting of the following month,” Peacock said. “That is a self-imposed. There is nothing in the statute in writing. Practically every chancery clerk adheres to that policy or earlier. Occasionally, if I was missing two documents, I would have the minutes ready to record, but I would have them on the counter for anybody to review them - either one or both of the missing documents. But I would record if I only had one missing document.
“On rare exceptions, I may have been late one or two days.”
Peacock said he had to work extra hours many times to make sure the minutes were properly recorded.
“I spent many a weekends working in the chancery clerk’s office making sure my records were always up to date,” he said.
Pat Davis, the county supervisor for District 2, felt the minutes should be up to date, but he was glad the public was still able to access them.
“You could walk in and you could access them. They weren’t stowed away where you could not see them,” said Davis, who said he planned to confirm at the March 20 meeting that Parham would have the minutes up to date by Friday.
“She knows what law she is supposed to follow and what procedure she is supposed to follow,” Davis said.
District 5 supervisor Will Young said there is a protocol in place for the minutes to be recorded in a timely manner in case there are questions or corrections are needed.
“We addressed it to a certain degree. I can’t remember if we implemented any other demand or structure,” said Young, who added it wasn’t the first time he’d heard about a clerk’s office being behind in recording minutes. “It’s pretty common.”
District 4 supervisor Johnny Newson said learning curves are customary when an office such as Parham’s has new employees.
“There were new employees. She was training them. If there were any minutes not up to date, that was just a minor infraction,” Newson said. “I’ve got the utmost confidence in Ms. Parham. I think she’s doing an excellent job.”
District 1 supervisor and board president Paul Pearson said he didn’t realize the minutes were behind and it’s not something the board of supervisors watch.
“We depend on the chancery clerk, who I think is in charge of that,” Pearson said. “We depend on them, so I guess we’ll have to see what it’s going to take to get it corrected.”
District 3 supervisor Derrell Washington declined to comment.
