Alaska Division of Legislative Audit
Audit Digest #41-30009-02

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PURPOSE OF THE REPORT

In accordance with the provisions of AS 24.20.281 and a special request from the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee, we have conducted a review of the certain procedures used by the Alaska Court System (ACS). More specifically, we reviewed the procedures followed to ensure compliance with the provisions of AS 22.05.140(b), AS 22.07.090(b) and AS 22.10.190(b). These statutes require judicial officers of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals and Superior Court to attest they have met specified work production standards before receiving their salary warrants.

REPORT CONCLUSIONS

With very few exceptions, superior court judges are in compliance with the affidavit statute

In general, Alaska court system's superior court judges comply with AS 22.10.190(b). This statute provides that a salary warrant may not be issued to a judge until an affidavit has been filed stating that no matter referred to them has been undecided for a period greater than six months.

We analytically reviewed more than 35,000 superior court cases filed between July 1, 1999 and June 30, 2001. From this analytical review we selected 239 cases involving 229 matters for detailed analysis.

From this detailed analysis, we identified 21 instances where a matter was before a superior court judge longer than six months at the date the affidavit was signed. Of these 21 decisions the judge involved appropriately withheld their affidavit in all but 12 instances. This represents a negligible .03% rate of noncompliance with the statute (as measured against the number of cases analytically reviewed).

Based on our review, all situations where salary affidavits were filed inappropriately were inadvertent. The court system does not have a single, centrally utilized management information system that tracks pending decisions before each superior court judge. Each judge must rely on their own documentation and filing system to keep apprised of the status of their workload. For the most part this decentralized process has worked very well. However, when errors do occur, they often go on for a period of time without the judge involved being aware of the situation.

Due to scope limitations we could not assess affidavit compliance for the appellate courts

We were not allowed to review documentation to confirm the accuracy of the relevant dates nor were we allowed access to information that identified which judge or justice received a given assignment for a particular case for the appellate courts. Our access was restricted because of the confidential status of the information involved. The Supreme Court believes that allowing access to these records would compromise the integrity of the collaborative decision-making process. Accordingly, we could not assess compliance with the applicable salary affidavit statutes.

The table below summarizes unaudited information from the ACS's case management system. Compliance with salary affidavits was measured in two ways.

1. Using the court systems interpretation and application which is discussed in the Background Information section of the report.
2. Using a publicly issued decision document as the measurement date for when an opinion or decision was made.

Court	Matters for decision	Decision longer than 6 months measured by:
		ACS interpretation	Date publicly issued
Supreme Court	590	8 (1.3%)	69 (11.7%)
Court of Appeals	249	7 (2.8%)	119 (47.8%)

The Department of Administration records show that some appellate jurists did not file a salary affidavit during each pay period in FY 00 and FY 01. However, we cannot determine if those withheld salary affidavits correlate to the matters which had late decisions because of our restricted access to court records.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The Alaska Court System's administrative director should utilize the new integrated management information system (MIS) to track the timeliness of matters pending decision by judicial officers.

   ACS should develop and maintain a centralized MIS which would allow for efficient, accurate reporting of specific case information. An important aspect of the system should be generation of reports that would aid judges in tracking the status of matters before them. Rather than delegating sole responsibility to each individual judicial officer to monitor the status of pending decisions before them, a reliable MIS-generated report would be available to assist judges in complying with the affidavit statute.

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