416-thousand dollars are unaccounted for in the St. Louis circuit clerk’s office. A state audit says the shortage dates back to the adminstration of the previous clerk. The present clerk, Mariano Favazza, says the audit reports the bookkeeping is so bad that the auditor could not determine what happened to the money. The audit also finds the clerk is holding more than eight million dollars in fees and court costs that should be refunded to participants in court cases, but has not. Some of the money has been held for 20 years and the records are so poor that it’s impossible to tell who should get how much of most of the money.
