The Seward County Board of Commissioners once more circled back to the local audit conducted on the Seward County Sheriff’s Drug Interdiction Task Force’s records at its Dec. 2 meeting.
The commissioners have been working to reconcile differing interpretations of the task force’s record keeping and submission of reports to Nesbitt and Associates auditors after receiving an audit report in late October.
Auditors Matthew M. Sutter, a public safety consultant, and Thomas Nesbitt, Nesbitt & Associates chief executive officer and president, noted in their Sept. 22 audit explanation that the task force could improve its tracking of expenditures and inventory to comply with industry standards and federal guidelines for the use of funds derived from seized assets in the interdiction program.
The audit covered task force expenditures from July 2023 through April 2025. They also recommended creation of purchasing policies and procedures for the task force.
Since then, county commissioners Darrell Zabrocki and Scott Pekarek have worked with Sheriff Mike Vance and his staff regarding the purchase order policy and process and addressed the audit’s questions around task force inventory tracking.
The sheriff’s office told the commissioners they had not received a written request to share its inventory report with the auditors and that the data points auditors mentioned are recorded in the Zuercher database used by the sheriff’s office and the 911 Communication Center. Commissioners previously looked at the department’s inventory list, but discussed combining multiple data points from Zuercher into a single inventory report.
The commissioners are now asking Nesbitt to provide a final document responding to the county’s questions about the audit.
The commissioners said the information entered on Zuercher helps the task force show how many hours deputies spend on drug-related activity. The data would also link the equipment purchased with interdiction funding to such activities as it documents its use of those federal disbursements.
County Attorney Wendy Elston, who attends the commissioners’ meetings and had her own interdiction activities audited by Nesbitt, said she recalls being asked verbally to submit inventory information.
But she also told commissioners that the reasons cited by the U.S. Department of Treasury when it held up anticipated disbursements to the county was not directly related to the inventory tracking questions raised in the separate audit.
Instead, the federal agency was focused on the payroll expenses listed as part of drug interdiction and the staff assigned to replace deputies working in the interdiction program, specifically those providing school resource work.
“It was because they were not doing the replacement person correctly,” she said.
Elston said she used forfeiture funds to create a new position in her office that solely addressed drug case work and hired a new person to fill that role.
Both Commission Chair Misty Ahmic and Pekarek said they had had phone conversations with the auditors prior to the meeting.
By the end of the discussion, Ahmic said the auditors would provide written responses to the county’s post-audit questions but would not be changing the original document.
