By Liz Beavers
lbeavers@newstribune.info
tribune managing editor

KEYSER — Expressing a desire to “get things straightened out before the new sheriff comes into office,” the Mineral County Commissioners are in the process of contacting the West Virginia State Auditor's Office for help in straightening out the finances in the Sheriff’s Department.
Commission President Janice LaRue said during a recent meeting that the officials have not received a financial statement from the sheriff's office since “July a year ago.”
“The state code says you will have it on the tenth of every month,” she said. “We haven’t had one for over a year.”
In addition, the approximately $5,600 in vehicle registration fees which were never deposited in the Division of Motor Vehicles account by the sheriff's office in 2006 was never found, and as a result, Mineral County residents wishing to renew their tags can no longer do so at the courthouse.
The incident remains under investigation by the West Virginia State Police.
Tuesday, LaRue told the News-Tribune that both she and County Coordinator Mike Bland have called the auditor's office to request they send someone in “to clean up the mess.”
“If they don't call me back, I’m calling (Auditor) Glen Gainer himself. We've got to get somebody up here,” she said.
The state of the county's finances have been in question for quite sometime now, as bookkeepers have come and gone during the two four-year terms that White has been in office.
“He’s fired three bookkeepers now,” LaRue said, noting that it's hard to keep any continuity when there's such a continual change in personnel.
At one point, the county contracted with an outside accountant to help bring the finances up to date, but that plan was not only extremely expensive to the county, but LaRue also said the accountant's methods were not compatible with the way the county was doing things.
“He had a strange system which I think he made up on his own,” she said.
When the officials decided to terminate their contract with the accountant and install a new bookkeeping computer program, they thought their problems might be over. The program, however, has proven to be a lot more difficult that expected.
“I am real disillusioned with this program,” LaRue said. “It was supposed to be so easy.”
Bland feels the difficult with the accounting program is two-fold.
“The problem in part is staff’s understanding of how the program operates and part in getting the numbers into the system,” he said, noting that present staff members must physically input the recipts and records into the system. It is a process which is taking some time since they must go back several months.
LaRue credits current employees Cathy Bess and Erica Leatherman, however, for working hard to bring the county up to date using the new program. The task has proven, however, to be too much for them.
“We obviously have a huge problem here and it's behind what these girls can do,” LaRue said.
“They have worked and worked and worked ... but it's just more than they can handle.”
Bess told the commissioners she had hoped to have an up-to-date report to them by the end of October, but they had to “stop doing stuff so we could go back to 1997” to correct some of the work that had been done by the acacountant.
When confronted about the possibility of asking the state auditor's office to “take over the sheriff's tax office,” however, White told the commissioners “as far as he knows,” the finances are up to date.
“I mean, I don't check on it daily,” he told Commissioner Wayne Spiggle.
At that point, Spiggle made a motion to bring the auditor's office in “on an emergency basis” to get the situation “tidied up.”
Bess said she “would be glad” to work with whomever the auditor's office sends to Mineral County.
“You all need the help,” Commissioner Cindy Pyles told her.
“You have a new sheriff coming in here and he's going to want a full audit.”