Audit Complete

The Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office receives “every magazine in the country,” Sheriff Louis Ackal said only half-jokingly in a recent interview. “Somebody ordered all of them. I find that irresponsible.”

It’s not that Ackal doesn’t like to read. On a given day, two or three newspapers might lie folded on his desk, and the magazines stack nicely stacked across a coffee table in his office.

But Ackal cites the excess of magazines as a possible reflection of mismanagement of department funds during the previous administration of former Sheriff Sid Hebert.

Ackal will have his answer soon enough. A forensic audit of the Sheriff’s Office Ackal ordered shortly after taking office in July has recently been completed, Ackal said. 

“I’m anxiously awaiting that report,” Ackal said, adding he expects to receive the results within the next week or two. 

The audit, which began in August and was conducted by the Lafayette firm Kolder, Champagne and Slaven, will reveal how the Sheriff’s Office spent hundreds of thousands of dollars the year before Ackal took office. It included a thorough review of financial statements including cash, receivables, liabilities and capital.

Ackal said he has been particularly suspecting of the parish jail not receiving the $860,000 alloted for it due to what he described as its degenerate state when the administration inherited it. So “disgusted” was Ackal with the jail’s condition that he invited the news media over the summer to take a tour of the facility just two weeks after taking office.

“Obviously, all that money wasn’t spent on the jail,” Ackal said last week.

If all the digging turns up any malfeasance on the part of the previous administration, then those findings could be forwarded to various offices and agencies across the state and punitive measures could ensue, Ackal said.

But Hebert says Ackal has nothing to worry about as far as how the money was spent during his tenure.

“I know what kind of shop I ran and I wanted total accountability,” Hebert said in a telephone interview Friday. “I can say with complete and utter confidence that everything was done properly.”

Hebert, who is now working with the Louisiana Supreme Court in New Orleans, also described Ackal’s request for the audit as “unnecessary” to begin with. He said the previous administration conducted “extensvie auditing” in its final months.

That contrasts sharply with the position of the Ackal administraiton.

“The previous administration did not allow Sheriff Ackal’s staff access to the financial aspect of the operation of the Sheriff’s Office,” Wendell Raborn, public information officer for the Sheriff’s Office, said in an August interview. “Therefore it is important to have an audit to get an accurate accounting of the expenditures of the previous administration.”

As for the magazines, Hebert said he “didn’t know anything about that.”