Request By:
Mr. Joseph L. Moore
County Fee Systems
Executive Department for Finance and Administration
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
Under the new judicial system, beginning January 2, 1978, every circuit court clerk is required to collect all fines and forfeitures imposed in district and circuit court, and must issue receipts therefor. KRS 30A.120(1). Subsection (2) of KRS 30A.120 reads:
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"(2) At the close of business daily the clerk in each county shall deposit in a bank designated as a state depository the proceeds from fines and forfeitures, and within three (3) working days after the first and fifteenth of each month submit to the executive department for finance and administration a report listing all fines and forfeitures collected, and shall pay over to the department in the manner prescribed by the department at the same time all costs, fines, forfeitures, and other moneys so reported."
Your question: What constitutes "a listing of fines and forfeitures collected? (Emphasis added). We must bear in mind that the statutes [KRS 30A.120 and 30A.190] require the circuit court clerk to collect the fines and forfeitures imposed in the district and circuit courts and turn them in to the Department for Finance and Administration for ultimate deposit in the state treasury. The old statute, KRS 28.170, contained the words "listing all such fines and forfeitures. " To "list" means to "enumerate", or to ascertain the number of, or to specify one after another. See Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, pages 277 and 493. You say for your purposes in Finance the circuit clerk of a particular county need only show on the report to you a break-down as to the fines categories [traffic fines, non-traffic criminal fines, fish and game fines, weight violations fines] the dollar amount under each of such categories, and the date of collection. You say the complete detailed data on the report would be of no benefit to Finance and would be a burden on the clerks.
It is our opinion that the statute first requires the circuit court clerks to show on their office records the specific district or circuit court, by name and location, which imposed the fine or forfeiture, the complete name of the convicted defendant against whom the fine or forefeiture was imposed, the date the fine or forfeiture was imposed by the court, the offense of which defendant was convicted, the exact amount of the fine or forfeiture collected, the fines categories, and date of collection. We think this data is necessary in properly identifying such money. We believe the statute, by reasonable implication, requires this minimal identifying data. This data will assist any interested persons, including auditors, in determining precisely who fined whom for what and when and for what amount of money. This means that the identifying data must be kept by the circuit clerk on a daily basis, as the collections are made. In this way the clerk will have a perpetually developed system from which the reports to the Executive Department for Finance and Administration can be readily extracted. Should a clerk be delinquent, the Auditor of Public Accounts can quickly examine the clerk's daily records of identification of fines and forfeitures and make a precise determination of the delinquency and the financial impact. Cf. KRS 46.030, concerning identifying records of state funds collected by local officers. However, as to the report, to the Finance Department, we believe that it may properly include only the fines categories [traffic etc., as mentioned above], the dollar amount of fines, and the date the fines are collected. In this way the purpose of the statute can be properly and adequately effected.