The Massachusetts State Auditor visited the new Berkshire County District Attorney today.
On January 14th, Suzanne Bump released her office’s findings after auditing the Berkshire District Attorney’s office. A mostly satisfactory report did highlight two shortcomings: funds forfeited from illegal activities not being remitted to the DA’s office in “a timely manner,” and the office’s Internal Control Plan – essentially, its process and procedure guide – was in need of an update. Later that week, new DA Andrea Harrington told WAMC that she was acting on the audit’s findings. Friday, after a meeting in Pittsfield, Bump said she had confidence in Harrington.
“I am very pleased that she has taken this up personally, so seriously, rather than just passing it off to her staff, she has really taken a genuine and deep interest in the aspects of the audit that address the just general, day to day administration of agency – appropriate controls over activities like spending and accounting for state police overtime – but also that she has some very good ideas and already has been working with staff over areas where we found that there were some deficiencies,” said Bump.
Harrington said that in revising her office’s approach to forfeiting ill-gotten gains, she was carrying out a campaign promise.
“I made a commitment during the campaign around what types of funds that we would seek to have forfeited, and we really are – have trained our assistant district attorneys to seek funds that are really part of criminal enterprise," said the DA. "You know, we’re not going to be out looking to take grandma’s home because drug dealing was happening there. We’re really looking for funds that are the result of criminal activity.”
She also specified what updates she would be making to her office’s Internal Control Plan.
“We’re going to have guidelines for our ADAs on what our bail policies are, when do we look for people to be held on dangerousness – even policies on how we talk about defendants and victims and people in the community in our internal communications and our external communications,” said Harrington.
Bump noted that the office’s Victim Witness Advocacy program was found to be both in compliance and working well. She said she had given Harrington guidance gathered from her work in other DA offices around the state on another promise the Berkshire DA made on the campaign trail.
“We have recently conducted five audits of district attorney’s offices to look at their juvenile diversion programs. Berkshire County does not have one, but because the district attorney would like to implement one, I thought that I would just underscore what we saw in those diversion programs,” said the auditor.
The audit was requested by then-DA Paul Caccaviello upon his appointment in March 2018.
“It is pretty typical that there is a request simply for a transition audit," said Bump. "I don’t think that there were any particular concerns that he noted when he made the request. It’s just a good business practice to ask the auditor’s office for an audit such as this.”
Harrington took the opportunity to announce that the Berkshire ADAs had been given raises from a $46,000 base pay to $56,000, crediting the work of the Massachusetts District Attorney’s Association. Berkshire County paid a $200,000 share of the state-mandated increase, which went into effect in early January. Former DA David Capeless had explicitly noted the need for higher pay for the office staff when announcing his retirement in March 2018.
