Money Shot

The problems have never risen to the level of criminality, as the sheriff's supporters are quick to point out. Indeed, many of the sheriff's financial missteps seem petty. But considering that the audits have covered only small areas of Arpaio's budget, they raise the question of what a larger audit might reveal.

Ortega found that Arpaio was using enhancement money for expenses that had nothing to do with jails, much less enhancing them. The sheriff used the fund to finance a lawsuit against the county Board of Supervisors in 1994, despite telling reporters that taxpayers wouldn't get stuck with the bill. He had used it to send himself to National Sheriff's Conferences. He had also paid for a video news-clipping service. Jail conditions be damned, Arpaio needed to watch himself on Nightline.

Ortega's reporting triggered an investigation from the Arizona Auditor General, which echoed his findings. A total of $122,419 in expenditures "did not demonstrate that they 'enhanced' jail facilities and operations," the auditors concluded. Their report specifically cited the news clipping service and the money Arpaio had spent on conferences.

But nothing seems to have changed. Since 2003, records show, Arpaio has spent $34,387 in enhancement funds on news clipping services. He's also spent $345,644 of the fund to send employees to conferences and training seminars, records show. Employees were sent to classes for Photoshop, good grammar, and, of course, the National Sheriff's Conference.

Dennis Matthiesen, financial audit director for the auditor general, says his office is unlikely to revisit the issue. "Our office doesn't have any enforcement authority, whatsoever," he says. "We find what we find and we report it." From there, Matthiesen says, it's up to the sheriff to make changes, or the Board of Supervisors to demand them.

And that hasn't happened. Not only has Arpaio ignored the state auditor general, he's also ignored the county's in-house audit team.

In 2005, county auditors looked at how various agencies were handling travel expenses. The audit was so limited, it only looked at 24 trips involving the sheriff's office, all of them extradition cases where deputies picked up fugitives in other states.

The auditors still found plenty of problems.

In more than half the cases, the deputies were booked to arrive on the scene by early evening, giving them time to rest before prisoner pick-ups the next day. But, the audit noted, "deputies often took an additional day before taking custody of the prisoner and returning to their duty posts."

Deputies, apparently, were milking the taxpayers for beach time. When they picked up a prisoner in muggy Orlando, for example, the deputies stayed 119 miles away, in breezy Daytona Beach. The county got stuck paying for their mileage and an extra day at the hotel. The same pattern repeated itself in Myrtle Beach and Hawaii. (Weirdly, two deputies even chose to stay an extra day in Buffalo.)

The auditors concluded that, if the limited findings held true in a bigger sample, the sheriff could have saved $170,000 in 2005 alone by tightening travel policies.

But records suggest that everything is the same. In the year after the audit, the sheriff's costs for training and travel increased 11 percent.

The audit dealing with overtime spending was even more dramatic. It found that overtime had escalated, even as the sheriff added employees to the payroll.

The problem was lousy management. Sheriff's employees, the audit found, regularly write themselves down for overtime pay before they've even worked a full 40-hour week. (Stay late one night, and rather than cut hours later in the week, it's an automatic bonus.) Management, the auditors wrote, did "not appear to have considered staggered or overlapping shifts, or other alternatives, to reduce premium costs."

The audit suggests a certain chaos in jail operations.

Forty-three percent of sheriff's office employees weren't working in their budgeted departments, the auditors found. "[Employees] are frequently transferred between divisions, often without notice to applicable management."

After the auditors finished in May, the Sheriff promised to make changes. Still, he finished the 2007 fiscal year (ending June 30) more than $10.4 million in the red for overtime, and in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, Arpaio already shot his entire overtime budget for the year. It's clear that cost-saving measures were not a priority.

Today, county officials say they have control of Arpaio's budget. A recent memo from the budget office suggests that, if Arpaio can continue his new and improved cost-cutting plan, he will finish the year in the black.

But the plan depends, in part, on keeping visitors out of the jails after 2:30 p.m. Defense lawyers say they're going to do everything in their power to scuttle that.

So who can hold Sheriff Joe accountable?