GREENFIELD — $2.67 at Dunkin’. $3.99 at CVS. $12.84 at Fenway Park.
These are some transactions on procurement cards and Inmate Benefit Fund debit cards used by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office from 2021 to 2025 that are included in the Office of the Inspector General’s final report on sheriffs’ budgets, which Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro said is “a bit like the Wild West” between the chronic underfunding for sheriffs’ budgets and the illegal overspending by the 14 sheriff’s offices in Massachusetts.
Shapiro released a preliminary report in February detailing how sheriff’s offices across the state are funded, with the report calling the process “opaque, chaotic and deeply flawed.” This report found that “many sheriffs overspent their budgets annually, possibly in violation of state finance law,” though one factor contributing to this practice is the Legislature’s underfunding of the sheriffs’ General Appropriation Act each year.
“How we got to this point no longer matters. Sheriffs’ offices have been commonwealth agencies for more than 25 years. It is time for the chaos to stop,” Shapiro said in a statement about the final report, which was released on Monday. “The lack of a common understanding among sheriffs, lawmakers and the Executive Office of Administration & Finance (A&F) on such foundational ideas as the role of the sheriff, what the state covers for mandated programs, how funds derived from civil process are to be handled, along with the common understanding that the sheriffs’ General Appropriation is not sufficient and supplemental funding is all but guaranteed has resulted in uncontrolled spending with little to no oversight.”
Some of the report’s key findings include the discovery of 120 private bank accounts used within the sheriff’s offices, but outside the purview of the state treasurer and comptroller; payroll account transfers to cover other expenses that influenced the reporting of deficits; delayed reserve funding released to the sheriffs by the Office of Administration and Finance; and misunderstanding and misuse of civil process funds, among other findings.
Monday’s final report notes that the Legislature has already taken steps since the release of the preliminary report to address the budget process for sheriff’s offices moving forward. These changes, which will be reflected in fiscal year 2027, include separate line items for operations, no-cost calls, medication-assisted treatment funding and collective bargaining agreements, which the House and Senate have moved forward.
Franklin County Sheriff’s Office findings
Interim Franklin County Sheriff Lori Streeter, who was appointed in January 2025, said she doesn’t feel like this was a “horrible report” for her office, but that there’s some feeling of embarrassment regarding the procurement card, or p-card, and Inmate Benefit Fund debit card spending that she said has been addressed.
According to the report, p-cards can be used by all state departments and are tied to the Massachusetts Management Accounting and Reporting System. Users must sign agreements and follow use policies. The report states some purchases were in line with the intended use, while some transactions were “consistent with individuals purchasing food and items for personal use.”
Although the report lays out the receipts, with some explanation on these transactions that the Office of the Inspector General labeled as being “questionable” and suggesting “an abuse of public funds for personal use,” Streeter said there’s more to to it, as these are “client-driven” receipts.
According to Streeter, her office vetted the spending on these cards at the request of the Office of the Inspector General. The spending comes from re-entry case workers who are bringing former inmates who are transitioning back into society, referred to as “clients,” to programs in Boston and elsewhere. She said the workers were using the cards for the inmates in question, and not the office staff.
“They were en route somewhere, or picking someone up, and they stopped for lunch, or they stopped [and] got a coffee en route,” she said. “It’s also, for the client and our staff, it’s a good opportunity [for] a good-will gesture.”
As noted in the Office of the Inspector General’s report, there were two purchases that were unable to be accounted for: a $10.57 purchase at TD Garden in Boston on March 3, 2022, and a May 13, 2024, purchase at the “Game On” sports bar at Fenway Park for $12.84. Streeter said the Fenway Park purchase was for someone being released from jail who relocated out of state, and a fellow staff member purchased a hamburger at Fenway for this person. The TD Garden purchase was unable to be accounted for, Streeter said, but she mentioned it would have been a staff and client event.
According to the final report, $415,011 was spent on p-cards in total between FY23 and FY25, and within that time, Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Chief Financial Officer Maureen Egan said $165 worth of purchases were questionable.
Although Streeter said the intent is good, the optics are less so.
“We understand the optics of that, and we’d already started cutting this out anyway, so it’s not a huge hardship for us to adhere to this in any way,” Streeter said, adding that p-cards are going to be pulled back entirely.
“Since Sheriff Streeter took over, there’s only been two debit cards from the Inmate Benefit,” Egan added. “One is with the purchasing agent, and so she verifies what it’s going to be used for, and the other is with a supervisor, so if someone needs it to take an inmate out to some place on the way, they will actually tell her, ‘I’m going to be stopping to buy a cup of coffee for this person on our travels to Worcester or Boston’ or whatnot.”
Streeter also pushed back on the report’s statement that the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office’s p-card and Inmate Benefits Fund debit card purchases represent “a lack of respect for public resources.”
“In my mind, as far as I think about it, is that that couldn’t be further from the truth,” she said. “I understand why people would think that, and it really wasn’t just me going out and getting coffees or Diet Cokes or something like that. It was all client-related.”
While he was not asked by the Office of the Inspector General to participate in an interview as the report was being crafted, spending on p-cards and the Inmate Benefit Fund credit card occurred under the tenure of former Franklin County Sheriff Christopher Donelan. On Thursday, Donelan expressed that he felt the spending on those cards was a mistake, but he also noted these purchases were not for the benefit of the office staff.
“Maybe we should have just taken a $20 bill out of our pocket and paid for it that way, instead of with your agency card,” he said. “None of this was for the benefit of anybody other than an inmate or a former inmate.”
An additional part of the findings included a section on how some sheriffs expanded their law enforcement authority without legislative backing. The Office of the Inspector General contends that it was unable to find “any provision of law granting authority” for the operation of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Regional Dog Shelter in Turners Falls and for it to provide animal control services for several communities.
According to Streeter, local legislators have been aware of the dog shelter program and the animal control officers, and at the time this program was established, there wasn’t the need for a legislative “blessing” to operate them.
The Office of the Inspector General states there should be clarity by the Legislature to specify the responsibilities of the sheriffs and that funding for these activities must be line items within the annual General Appropriations Act. The report also recommends immediate action to review and update all p-card and debit card policies.
Heading in the right direction
Overall, Streeter said she believes both the preliminary report and final report by the Office of the Inspector General were well done.
When asked how she feels about how the report detailed the information that the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office provided to the Office of the Inspector General during its investigation, she said she believes the entire report wasn’t done in nearly as much detail, as it sought to capture just the big picture, but the office “fared well” in what information it provided and how it was explained.
In reflecting on the findings and what she can do for the budget moving forward, Streeter said she’s not opposed to more direction from the state.
“If someone wants to give us complete direction on how they feel we should do business and those kinds of things, I have no objection to that,” she said. “I think that, in some ways, it is helpful to me and to our administration.”
To Donelan, nothing in the report is “surprising” in how sheriff’s office budgets are underfunded. He mentioned how he’s sat on both sides of the table as a former state representative and a sheriff.
Some of the report’s important takeaways for him were the recommendations to fully fund the sheriffs’ budgets up front and standardizing practices for all offices across the state — practices he said would have been beneficial during his tenure.
“There is a lot in this report that the sheriffs have been begging for for decades, and just nothing has happened with them,” he said.
Streeter pointed out that, even before this investigation began, her tenure has been spent addressing the budget and spending. Heading into FY27, Streeter said the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office’s proposed budget is $25.07 million, an increase from FY26 due to rising medical and medication expenses, cost of food and utilities.
In FY26, FCSO was given a $21.03 million budget from the state, with the governor’s recommendation for FY27 at $21.44 million — the fourth lowest-funded sheriff’s budget in Massachusetts.
Upon taking office, she focused on a commitment to fiscal responsibility, noting that within the first six months, she cut the budget by $500,000. To reduce the budget, Streeter said contracted services were cut, along with some administrative positions. The primary focus, Streeter said, was to create a shift in culture among staff around spending.
“The biggest piece is the change in culture and the understanding that we don’t have this endless pot of money,” Streeter explained. “I’m not going to rely on supplemental budgets, even though that’s the way business was done; I don’t want that for us, and the staff have done a tremendous job of monitoring their spending in their divisions.”
Egan said that, from her perspective, this shift to a more cost-conscious spending culture is coming through.
With one of the immediate recommendations being a fully-funded FY26 supplemental budget, Streeter wants this report to inspire conversations with state and federal officials about the future of regional programs while a special commission continues to look at the consolidation of sheriff’s offices and services.
“People now … they’re very cognizant that there is a financial situation, that we need to watch every dollar,” Egan said.
