FOIA 25-196: Audits of the office, 2019 through 2024 — five county financial statements produced, two fiscal years missing

Watchdog Alerts

Why isn’t this basic information available to the public?

1. The request asked for audits of the prosecutor's office. What came back is the county's own annual financial statements — audits of Delta County as a whole. The office did not say whether it has ever been audited as an office, and did not say that it has not. It simply sent the county's statements.
2. Two fiscal years inside the requested window are missing. The release runs 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023. The fiscal year ended September 30, 2022 and the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 are not in it, and nothing in the release explains the gap. The office produced a 2018 audit that falls outside the window while omitting two that fall inside it.
3. There is no cover letter. No denial form. No exemption citation. No certificate of nonexistence. The request asked in advance that a claim of 'no such records' be accompanied by a written description of the search, the custodians consulted and the systems reviewed. The release contains no such certification for any category.
4. The request asked specifically for audit response plans, corrective action reports and follow-up evaluations. None was produced. If the county's audits contained no findings requiring a response, that is a fact the office could have stated; it did not.
5. The same annual statements the office produced are the documents that show what the office spends. The prosecuting attorney line in the General Fund schedule reads $620,237 in fiscal 2018, $557,689 in fiscal 2019 and $663,455 in fiscal 2023. Those figures were already public in the county's audit. Requests for the office's case statistics and case-processing figures were answered in 25-134, 25-136 and 25-137 with certificates of nonexistence.

Timing caveat. ProsecutorByKarpel went live in June 2024, so the audits produced here cover years that predate the system. This page does not fault the office for how it generated records before that date. It concerns what the office released, what it did not, and what it said about the records it holds.

On Wednesday, August 13, 2025, a three-page fax reached the Delta County Prosecutor's Office. It asked for something simple to describe and hard to answer: every audit of the office itself, from January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2024. Not audits of a case. Not audits of a defendant. Audits of the prosecutor's office — financial, operational, compliance, from any source, in any format, including drafts and records marked confidential.

The office took a volume extension to September 3, 2025. What it released was five annual county financial statements, running 734 pages: the audits of Delta County as a whole for the fiscal years ended September 30 in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023.

Two fiscal years inside the requested window are not there. The year ended September 30, 2022 is missing. The year ended September 30, 2024 is missing. And a year that falls outside the window — fiscal 2018, which ended before January 1, 2019 — was produced anyway.

There is no cover letter in the release. No denial form. No exemption citation. No certificate of nonexistence. The request had asked in advance that any claim of “no such records” be accompanied by a written description of the search, the custodians consulted and the systems reviewed. Nothing in the release answers that.

Summary

The request is short. It asks for “any and all internal or external audits, audit reports, audit findings, or related evaluations conducted on or for the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from January 1, 2019, through December 31, 2024.” It then lists what that includes: financial audits, operational audits and compliance audits; audits by internal county staff, independent contractors, or state and federal agencies; correspondence transmitting audit results to or from the office; and audit response plans, corrective action reports and follow-up evaluations. It asks for records labeled draft, final, internal, confidential or not for public release.

The cover note attached to the request is unusually specific about procedure. It says the request is “intentionally worded to capture all audits — financial, operational, compliance, or other — regardless of origin, scope, or format.” It says “no such records exist” will not be accepted as a sufficient denial unless accompanied by a detailed written certification describing the scope of the search, the custodians consulted, and the databases or file systems reviewed. It demands segregation of non-exempt portions. It states that drafts, working papers and preliminary findings are public records.

The office's answer engages none of that in writing. It sends five documents and stops.

What the five documents are matters. They are not audits of the prosecutor's office. They are the County of Delta's basic financial statements with supplemental information — the county's annual audit, prepared by an independent auditor, covering every department, every fund and every fiduciary account in county government. The prosecutor's office appears inside them as one line in the General Fund budget-and-actual schedule.

That line is worth reading, because it is the one place in the release where the office's own numbers appear. In fiscal 2018 the prosecuting attorney line reads $572,965 original budget, $591,067 final budget, $620,237 actual. In fiscal 2019 it reads $596,740 original, $586,182 final, $557,689 actual. In fiscal 2023 it reads $803,567 original, $725,147 final, $663,455 actual. Those figures were already public. The office did not have to produce them; the county publishes its audit. But their presence in the release is the reason this page can state what the office spends at all.

Five numbers describe what came back. 5 audits produced. 734 pages released. 2 fiscal years inside the window missing. 0 exemptions cited. 0 certificates of nonexistence.

What was requested

The request is dated August 13, 2025 and addressed to the FOIA Coordinator at 310 Ludington Street, Escanaba. It was faxed at 8:57 a.m. from a fax number beginning 1719 and logged by the county's fax platform at 11:58:42 a.m. that morning, three pages. It asks for:

“Any and all internal or external audits, audit reports, audit findings, or related evaluations conducted on or for the Delta County Prosecutor's Office from January 1, 2019, through December 31, 2024.”

and specifies that this includes, but is not limited to: financial audits, operational audits and compliance audits; audits performed by internal county staff, independent contractors, or state and federal agencies; correspondence transmitting audit results to or from the prosecutor's office; and audit response plans, corrective action reports and follow-up evaluations. It asks for all responsive records “whether labeled as draft, final, internal, confidential, or not for public release.” It asks for electronic PDF by email, and for an itemized estimate before processing if fees would exceed $20.

Four features of the request matter to how it was answered.

It asked about the office, not the county. The words are “conducted on or for the Delta County Prosecutor's Office.” A county-wide financial statement is an audit of Delta County. Whether it is also an audit “of” the prosecutor's office is the interpretive question at the center of this file, and the office did not address it.

It asked for operational and compliance audits, not only financial ones. A financial audit tests whether the books are accurate. An operational or compliance audit tests whether a program does what it is supposed to do. The request named both. The release contains only financial statements.

It asked for the paperwork that follows an audit. Response plans. Corrective action reports. Follow-up evaluations. These are the documents that show what an office did about a finding. None was produced.

It set the terms of a nonexistence claim in advance. The cover note requires a written certification describing the scope of the search, the custodians consulted and the systems reviewed. That is a higher bar than the statute's own certificate. The office did not meet either one, because it did not claim nonexistence at all.

The paper trail

What the office produced

Five audits. Every one is the same document type: County of Delta, Michigan — Basic Financial Statements with Supplemental Information. Each opens with an independent auditor's report, moves through management's discussion and analysis, the government-wide statements, the fund statements and the notes, and closes with required supplemental information and a schedule of findings and responses.

What was asked, and what came back

The request enumerates its categories. Setting them against the release shows which ones the office answered and which ones it passed over in silence.

Two missing years, and one that should not be there

The arithmetic of the release is the part that invites questions. The request set a window: January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2024. The county's fiscal year ends September 30. So the fiscal years that overlap that window are fiscal 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 — six audits.

Five came back. Fiscal 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023 are present. Fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2024 are not.

And fiscal 2018 is present, though its year ended on September 30, 2018, three months before the window opened. Producing it is not a violation of anything. A public body may release more than it was asked for, and a clerk assembling a run of audits may simply have pulled the shelf. But the combination is odd: the office reached back one year past the window and stopped two years short of its end.

There is a second explanation available, and the record does not rule it out. The fiscal 2024 audit may not have been finished when the office answered on September 3, 2025. The fiscal 2023 audit in this release carries a file creation date of August 29, 2025 — five days before the response — which is consistent with an audit that had only just been finalized. If fiscal 2024 was still in progress, the office could have said so. It did not.

The fiscal 2022 gap has no such innocent reading on the face of the record. That audit would have been completed in 2023. It exists somewhere, or the county went a year without an audit, which is not a thing counties do.

What the office did not do is claim the records do not exist. Under MCL 15.235(4), a public body that does not possess a requested record must certify that fact, and the certificate must state that the record does not exist under the name given or another name reasonably known to the body. No certificate appears in this release. That is not necessarily a failure — a partial grant does not require a certificate for the parts that were produced — but it does mean the public has no statement from the office about the two missing years at all.

No cover letter, and what that costs the public

The most striking thing about this release is what is not in it. There is no response letter. No Notice of Denial. No exemption log. No index of documents. No statement of the search performed. The packet is the extension notice and five PDFs.

That matters because a FOIA response is supposed to be reviewable. When an office produces documents and cites nothing, a requester cannot tell whether the production is complete, whether something was withheld, or whether the office simply did not look. The statute gives a requester the right to appeal a denial under MCL 15.240. A response that denies nothing and explains nothing gives the requester nothing to appeal.

Compare the office's practice elsewhere in this archive. In 25-194 the office sent a letter, a Notice of Denial and a Detailed Cost Itemization. In 25-195 it sent a letter that granted in part, denied in part, cited attorney-client privilege and certified a category nonexistent. In 25-137 and 25-139 it sent denial forms with certificates of nonexistence. Those responses can be read, checked and argued with.

This one cannot. It is a stack of documents with no cover.

The pattern: send the county's audit, not the office's

There is a reading of this file that is entirely innocent, and it should be stated first. The prosecutor's office is a department of Delta County. The county audits its own books every year, and those audits include the prosecutor's office as a line item. When asked for audits, a coordinator may reasonably have understood the request to mean the county audits that cover the office, pulled five years off the shelf, and sent them. No evasion required.

But that reading has to survive three facts.

First, the request asked for audits “on or for” the office, and named operational and compliance audits. A county financial statement is neither. If the office read the request narrowly, it could have said so in one sentence: the office is not separately audited; the county's annual financial statements are the only audits that cover it. That sentence would have answered the request completely. It is not in the release.

Second, the office has a documented habit of answering narrow questions with narrow documents and letting the silence do the work. In 25-134, 25-136 and 25-137, requests for case statistics were met with certificates of nonexistence. In 25-195, the same office produced four Adult Case Tracking reports with run dates of 11/30/2023 — proof that the statistics existed and could be printed. The pattern is not that the office refuses. It is that the office produces a document that is adjacent to the request and does not say what it did not produce.

Third, the documents produced here contain the office's own numbers. The prosecuting attorney line in the General Fund schedule is the office's budget, published inside the county audit. So the office did release something about itself — not an audit of its performance, but an accounting of its money. That is the difference between being audited for accuracy and being audited for how you do your job. The county audit answers the first question. The request asked the second.

The legal framework, in plain terms

Three provisions of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act govern a response like this one.

MCL 15.235 sets the clock and the certificate. A public body must respond within five business days, may extend that period once for up to ten business days on stated grounds, and must certify when a requested record does not exist. The extension taken here is the county's own forty-business-day form, which is longer than the statutory ten; the office used twenty-one calendar days of it.

MCL 15.240 gives a requester the right to appeal a denial, either to the public body's head or to circuit court. The right attaches to a denial. A production with no cover letter and no stated basis is hard to appeal because there is nothing identified to appeal.

MCL 15.244 requires segregation. If a record contains exempt and nonexempt material, the body must separate them and release the nonexempt portion. Nothing in this release invokes the section, because nothing in it was withheld on exemption.

None of these provisions requires a public body to write a narrative explaining its production. That is the honest limit of this page. The office's response may be entirely lawful. What the record shows is that the response is not reviewable on its face, and that two audits inside the requested window were not produced and were not accounted for.

Authorities and sources cited on this page

Show the statutes, cases, and sources cited on this page

Michigan Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.231 et seq.; MCL 15.233 (public records subject to disclosure); MCL 15.234 (fee waivers and reductions); MCL 15.235 (response time, extensions, certificates of nonexistence); MCL 15.240 (appeals); MCL 15.243 (exemptions); MCL 15.244 (segregation).

Documents: the August 13, 2025 request letter and cover note; the Notice to Extend Response Time for Request No. 25-196; and the five released audits — County of Delta, Michigan, Basic Financial Statements with Supplemental Information, years ended September 30, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023. All are published on this page in redacted form.

What would move this forward

A follow-up request could close the gap without asking the office to do any new analysis. It would ask for two documents by name — the county audit for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2022 and the one for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 — and for a written statement of whether the prosecutor's office has ever been the subject of an audit, review or examination that was not the county's annual financial statement. If the answer is no, one sentence settles it. If the answer is yes, the office has a document to produce.

A second follow-up would ask for the correspondence between the independent auditor and the county during the most recent audit, including any management letter, and for any written response the prosecutor's office made to a finding. Those documents exist in every county audit cycle. Whether the prosecutor's office appears in them is a question the public can currently only guess at.

Both requests are listed in our internal working list.

Documents

These are redacted copies prepared for publication. Requester names, home addresses, personal phone numbers, and email addresses have been removed. Unredacted originals are not hosted on the public web server.

Related FOIA requests

• FOIA 26-292 — FOIA 26-292: The office used the requester's own cost-saving clause to withdraw the request, then offered to grant it if he removed the clause (Granted in part, denied in part — no records produced; the office conceded the data exists and refused the aggregate on the ground that the requester's own scope limitation excluded it, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-291 — FOIA 26-291: The office answered a request for a privilege log with nine document titles — and cited a subsection of the FOIA that does not exist (Granted in part — a nine-row title-and-date table supplying two of the eleven requested fields, no count, and a citation to a subsection of MCL 15.243 that does not exist, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-290 — FOIA 26-290: The office refused the victim-services records because it says you already have them — from a packet that contained none (Refused — five paragraphs labelled “granted” but zero pages produced, on the authority of a prior production that contained no responsive documents; the sixth paragraph received no disposition, October 25, 2026)
• FOIA 26-131 — FOIA 26-131: Twenty case files, priced at $82.66 before a single page is copied (Granted in part — release conditioned on a $41.33 deposit; no records produced yet, April 17, 2026)
• FOIA 26-35 — FOIA 26-35: The office counted 52 pleas in 85 minutes — eight days after saying the same kind of aggregate did not exist (Granted — 52 pleas reported from the District and Circuit Court dockets, no fee quoted, no exemption cited, no pages withheld; the count is over-inclusive by the office's own admission, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-34 — FOIA 26-34: The office denied a count of diversion cases by defining “diversion” down to a programme it does not run (Denied — certificate of nonexistence under MCL 15.233(1), Denial Form box 2 checked, on the ground that the only diversion programme in Delta County is juvenile diversion administered by the Probate Court; no exemption cited, no fee quoted, no waiver determination, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-33 — FOIA 26-33: Asked to count deferred prosecution agreements, the office certified the total nonexistent and priced the underlying data at $9,093.33 (Granted in part and denied in part — the aggregate record denied as requiring creation of a new record, with a certificate of nonexistence and Denial Form box 2 checked; the underlying data granted subject to a $9,093.33 estimate, a $4,546.66 deposit and a 270-day production estimate; public-interest fee waiver left undetermined, February 9, 2026)
• FOIA 26-32 — FOIA 26-32: What the office's own memos say about the migration that broke its records — a 95-page production that answers its own denial (Granted in part, denied in part — five records produced across 95 pages, with only personal contact information redacted under MCL 15.243(1)(a); no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-31 — FOIA 26-31: Asked how many crime scenes a prosecutor attended, the office listed eight documents and denied them as duplicative (Denied in full — refused as a duplicative request under Densmore v Department of Corrections, on the ground that the eight listed records were already produced in response to FOIA 25-267; Denial Form box 1 checked with the section 13 subsection left blank; no aggregate figure supplied and no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-30 — FOIA 26-30: Eight documents, one number, and a Densmore refusal built on a premise the record does not fully support (Denied — no aggregate total produced; eight responsive documents identified but not reproduced under a Densmore prior-production rationale; no fee quoted, February 6, 2026)
• FOIA 26-29 — FOIA 26-29: A count of inherited convictions the office could not locate — priced at $1,033.33 for the work of counting (No count produced — office could not locate a record; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,033.33 with a $516.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-28 — FOIA 26-28: A headcount of cases open when the prosecutor took office — denied, then priced at $1,653.33 on an 800-file baseline (Denied in part, granted in part — no record states the headcount, with a certificate of nonexistence; underlying data granted subject to segregation and priced at $1,653.33 with an $826.66 deposit, February 5, 2026)
• FOIA 26-22 — FOIA 26-22: A conviction rate the office says does not exist, priced at $9,548 (Denied — record does not exist; $9,548 quote for the underlying files, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-21 — FOIA 26-21: A count of convictions the office says does not exist — then a quiet amendment that changed the number behind the bill (Denied as a compilation — no count produced; fee of $9,548.00 quoted for underlying files; amended response revised the volume figure without explanation, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 26-20 — FOIA 26-20: The aggregate case total, and the records that would let you count it (Denied — record does not exist, January 30, 2026)
• FOIA 25-279 — FOIA 25-279: The office granted the personnel and budget records on paper — then sent three invoices totaling $34,673.79 and none of the records (Granted in part on paper — dozens of records listed as enclosed and none enclosed; three cost itemizations totaling $34,673.79, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-278 — FOIA 25-278: The office says it never tracked plea bargaining — then bills $23,146.66 for a 4,000-file review it says is already covered by another invoice (Granted in part — 62 trials produced from the calendar; plea-offer data certified not to exist; a $23,146.66 estimate the office says is moot if the twin invoice is paid, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-277 — FOIA 25-277: No annual statistical report exists, the underlying data does, and the office prices it at $34,720 (Granted in part — no statistical report exists; the underlying data is granted at a $34,720 estimate built on a volume figure the office has never counted, November 25, 2025)
• FOIA 25-257 — FOIA 25-257: Three certificates of nonexistence, then a $19,840 bill to rebuild the data by hand (Denied — three certificates of nonexistence, with a $19,840 estimate to rebuild the same data by hand, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-254 — FOIA 25-254: Two certificates of nonexistence, two documents produced, and a $74,520 itemization copied from an earlier request (Granted in part, denied in part — two documents produced, two certificates of nonexistence, and a $74,520 estimate identical to FOIA 25-244's, October 31, 2025)
• FOIA 25-244 — FOIA 25-244: Ten service slips, thirteen policy manuals, and a $74,520 quote (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-241 — FOIA 25-241: The special-prosecutor petition the office filed, and the 2024 memo that says it did not need another one (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-240 — FOIA 25-240: Officer use-of-force referrals, and the $1,863 bill for the one part the office would search (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-239 — FOIA 25-239: The Brady/Giglio list and how the office tracks officer credibility (Granted in part, denied in part, October 10, 2025)
• FOIA 25-234 — FOIA 25-234: Four lab reports, two certificates, and 26.4 grams where the press said four ounces (Granted in part, October 1, 2025)
• FOIA 25-202 — FOIA 25-202: No RFP, no bid, no purchase order — and the emails that show how the system was picked (Granted in part, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-201 — FOIA 25-201: ProsecutorByKarpel contracts, invoices, and licensing (Granted in part, denied in part, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-200 — FOIA 25-200: The software the office runs on — seven systems named, one of them retired in June 2024 (Granted in full, August 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-197 — FOIA 25-197: A request for complaints against the office came back as the office's own civil-rights lawsuits (Granted in part, denied in part, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-195 — FOIA 25-195: Reports on the office's own work — four case-tracking reports produced, performance reviews certified nonexistent, county reports withheld as attorney-client (Granted in part and denied in part — ten documents produced; county reports withheld on attorney-client privilege; performance reviews certified nonexistent; $5,961.60 estimated, $2,980.80 deposit, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-194 — FOIA 25-194: Every email and text the Prosecutor sent in 2024 — a $63,028.80 estimate on a request the requester offered to narrow (Granted in part and denied in part — exemptions cited; $63,028.80 estimated, $31,514.40 deposit required, 270 days, August 13, 2025)
• FOIA 25-215 — FOIA 25-215: Three answers to one request — two certificates of nonexistence, a grant, and a $13,248 estimate (Granted in part, August 9, 2025)
• FOIA 25-180 — FOIA 25-180: Two boxes checked — the trial records both “already provided” and “do not exist” (Denied in full — certificate of nonexistence plus an exemption box checked; no fee, no pages produced, August 2, 2025)
• FOIA 25-139 — FOIA 25-139: Forfeitures in cases that ended without a conviction, certified not to exist — while the same office took an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-137 — FOIA 25-137: The average time from charge to disposition, certified not to exist — after a ten-day extension for “voluminous” records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-136 — FOIA 25-136: The plea-agreement count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-135 — FOIA 25-135: The office denied the 2024 trial summary as a record that “does not exist” — then produced eight case files on the next page (Granted in part — 8 case files produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-134 — FOIA 25-134: The dismissed-case count the office certified does not exist — after taking an extension for the volume of records (Denied in full — certified that the record does not exist; no fee quoted, no pages produced, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-133 — FOIA 25-133: The office certified the monthly count did not exist — then attached an annual one and offered to sell the underlying data for $2,815.20 (Granted in part — one annual screening table produced; monthly counts withheld; $2,815.20 quoted with a $1,407.60 deposit, June 27, 2025)
• FOIA 25-129 — FOIA 25-129: Arraignment-to-disposition times the office certified do not exist, then priced at $2,931.12 (Granted in part — two items denied as nonexistent; $2,931.12 quote on the third, June 26, 2025)
• FOIA 25-118 — FOIA 25-118: Final case outcomes for January and February 2025 (Fee estimate issued, June 18, 2025)
• FOIA 25-94 — Prosecutor Case Outcome Statistics, 2021–2025 (Granted in Part, May 23, 2025)