DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa state officials have been sparring over the Iowa Judicial Branch having $26 million in misallocated funds, and an audit of the branch was released Tuesday morning.

State Auditor Rob Sand (D) released the audit for Fiscal Year 2023 for the branch. A coding error wrongly distributed the funds from unpaid debt collections over the last three fiscal years.

“Every single one of these programs had money sitting in their account this entire time,” said Auditor Sand (D).

The report shows the funds that were wrongly distributed to seven state funds, and includes a chart of the lowest monthly cash balance for each of the seven funds over the last three years. Sand used that to show the different funds still had enough money to continue providing the services as normal.

Those comments and the audit report comes after Republican lawmakers criticized Sand’s office for not warning lawmakers that there was an issue in coding. Sand at a news conference Tuesday said that it was changes made in a bill passed by Iowa Republicans in the 2020 session that started the coding issue.

“The lion’s share of it started when they passed these bills in June, making them live in July, and then in the following session they actually passed another bill making changes retroactively” said Sand. “So they were supposed to, in the judicial branch, not only change the coding but then go back and figure out, okay, how do we undo what we have been doing over the last year?”

Sand recommended that lawmakers act this session so those $26 million can go to the correct funds in the judicial branch.

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