Linn County faces 192 uncashed payroll checks

CEDAR RAPIDS - Iowa has the Great Iowa Treasure Hunt each year, in which State Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald seeks to find the owners of millions of dollars from lost or abandoned accounts.

Is the Great Linn County Treasure Hunt next?

The prospect for a Linn County version to identify those who are owed a total of $23,582 had not been intended by county officials.

Instead, the county's realization that it had unclaimed funds was the result of a private firm's request for public information; a little lax county oversight; and fresh turmoil among the Linn County Board of Supervisors, its finance director, Steve Tucker, and Linn County Auditor Joel Miller (with Linn County Attorney Jerry Vander Sanden in the mix, too).

The matter has raised one interesting question: Should only a few with old, uncashed county checks in the largest amounts - Vander Sanden, for instance, is owed $1,932 from a 12-year-old payroll check - be paid while the majority who are owed smaller, even tiny amounts be written off and forgotten?

In response to an information request in late August from Professional Finders, a Florida firm, Linn County developed a list of 537 payroll checks to employees, part-time employees, temporary employees and employees in the county's Options shelter workshop that it appears never were cashed going back to May 1999.

The checks range from 1 cent to $6,270.

According to Miller's latest review of the county data on Thursday, the data shows that 192 different individuals did not cash county checks issued to them. The large majority are developmentally disabled adults who have participated in the Options sheltered workshop in the last 15 years.

Options' clients can earn very small amounts in any pay period, so many of these checks are for very small amounts.

For now, the supervisors - at the recommendation of county Finance Director Tucker - have agreed to pay the eight largest checks on the list, which prompted Miller to object.

Tucker said this week that he recommended payment of the largest checks and not the others because many of the others are for so small an amount, it could cost the county substantially more to find people and issue new checks than what the original uncashed checks are worth.

Miller said those owed smaller amounts should be paid as well as those owed more.

'We shouldn't be holding anyone out as second-class citizens,” he said.

He said his office will get to work to help find people on the list.

Linn County Supervisor Ben Rogers said this week that the county's finance director had brought the largest uncashed checks to the supervisors' attention, but the supervisors haven't addressed the other smaller checks to date. Rogers said his inclination is to pay them.

'If we have an (uncashed check) for 5 cents, we are responsible for that,” Rogers said. 'If we have ones for $12, we need to have those paid.”

Supervisors Linda Langston, John Harris and Brent Oleson on Thursday said the supervisors need to better analyze the list before they sort out whom to pay or not pay from among the smaller uncashed checks.

Langston and Oleson said they have followed Finance Director Tucker's recommendation to pay the eight bigger uncashed checks on the list after Tucker conducted a review of those.

Langston said the entire exercise has helped the county improve procedures in the county auditor's office and county treasurer's office to void uncashed checks in a timely way.

Miller said he self-reported the discovery of old uncashed checks to the county's outside audit firm after the matter came to light this fall. At the same time, he said he is willing to share some of the responsibility.

'I'm not blaming anybody,” he said. 'We missed it.”