[StBernard] Former St. Bernard Parish clerk, son and daughter subject of audit

[Westley Annis]

Former St. Bernard Parish clerk, son and daughter subject of audit
 By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
on December 10, 2012 at 4:21 PM, updated December 10, 2012 at 5:46 PM Print

Link to report:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/116307958/St-Bernard-Parish-Clerk-of-Court-Louisia
na-Legislative-Auditor-report
http://is.gd/OmZc1m

Former St. Bernard Parish Clerk of Court Lena Torres, 91, allegedly failed
to collect $174,300 in civil court filing fees in a timely manner from her
son, prominent private Chalmette attorney Sidney D. Torres III, according to
a recent Louisiana legislative auditor's report. Meanwhile, Lena Torres'
daughter, former Chief Deputy Clerk Lena Nunez, may also have violated state
law by destroying billing records related to her brother's account,
according to the audit.

"By not requiring her son to pay the advance court costs at the time of
filing, Ms. Torres may have violated state law," the audit states. "In
addition, by allowing her son this extended period of time to pay these
costs, it appears that Ms. Torres provided her son with a loan of public
funds which may have violated the Louisiana Constitution.

"Finally, former Chief Deputy Clerk Lena Nunez may have violated state law
by destroying clerk of court billing records relating to Mr. Torres'
account."

The 86-page audit report states that the clerk did not collect all the
advance court costs for at least some of the 581 civil suit filings by her
son from between June 2009 and May 2011. The majority of the civil suits are
related to insurance claims and damages caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera conducted the audit after receiving an
allegation from the Metropolitan Crime Commission.

Attorneys representing Sidney Torres III, Lena Torres and Lena Nunez
adamantly denied the charges.

"Mr. Torres has never requested, and was never afforded, any special
treatment by his mother, nor was he relieved of any financial obligation or
responsibility," Sidney Torres' attorney, Leonard Levenson, stated. "We also
find these allegations extremely offensive."

Freeman Matthews, the attorney for Lena Torres and Lena Nunez, claimed the
audit "is riddled with misunderstandings, misapprehensions, faulty
presumptions, improperly skewed statistics and conclusions that are not
supported by the facts of the matter."

An attorney who has worked on hurricane and oil spill claims, Sidney Torres
III is the father of former SDT Waste & Debris Services garbage magnate,
Sidney Torres IV, who sold his company last year. Sidney Torres IV is Lena
Torres' grandson.  

Dollars and cents, and campaign allegations

In October 2011, Sidney Torres III paid $99,566 of the $174,300 that the
legislative audit claims he owed. The payment was made during Lena Torres'
campaign to retain the clerk of court office, which she eventually lost to
Randy Nunez in November 2011. Purpera arrived at the higher figure because
there is typically a $300 advance filing fee for each suit.

The legislative auditor's report states "there was not sufficient
documentation supporting the charges in Mr. Torres' account," and so "we
could not determine whether the $99,566 ultimately paid by Mr. Torres was
the appropriate amount."

Despite that question mark on how much Torres may have actually owed,
Levenson claims that Sidney Torres III likely did not even have to make the
$99,566 payment and that he only did so "in order to lessen the adverse
consequences of the slanderous attack upon Mrs. Torres during her campaign."

In his response to the audit, Levenson writes that the nearly $100,000
payment "was merely an expedited attempt to seek the immediate termination
of the untrue, unfair and malicious attack" during last year's campaign
cycle.

During that election, Randy Nunez alleged that Sidney Torres III hadn't
always paid clerk fees and that files were destroyed to cover up such
alleged impropriety.

Randy Nunez shares only a distant relation with Lena Torres' daughter Lena
Nunez.

Lena Torres took over the office in 1988 after the death of her husband,
Sidney Torres Jr., who had held the post since 1956. She started working in
the clerk's office in 1940, when she was 19.

Advanced filing fees

While the audit states that Lena Torres did not collect advance filing fees
required by state law from her son, Levenson states that most of the fees
referred to in the audit were not even required because of the nature of
severing mass joinder lawsuits.

In a mass joinder, plaintiffs who sue the same entity share their legal
fees, but their actions remain separate, and so judgments can differ from
one individually named party to another, depending on the circumstances.


>From June 2009 to May 2011, Sidney Torres III filed six mass joinder

lawsuits that eventually were severed through consent decrees, resulting in
461 individual suits. The legislative auditor's report maintains that after
such severing, Sidney Torres III was required to pay advance filing fees for
each of the suits. Levenson claims that was not needed because they were not
new suits or initial filings.

While the clerk's office did not have written policies or procedures to
handle such cases, Lena Nunez said it was office practice to accept and file
all civil lawsuits, whether the advance costs were paid at the time of
filing or not.

The practice was to send the person a past-due bill, but the clerk's office
did not regularly follow up until the conclusion of the case, Lena Nunez
said. Nunez, and her attorney Matthew, said the clerk's office would finally
collect any past-due payments at the end of the case, because the clerk
would not file the case's final judgment until all court costs had been
paid.

"This system was in place and was effective for Ms. Torres during her
40-plus years in office, without a single write-up by her internal audit
staff or your office (or your predecessors)," Matthews wrote in response to
the audit.

But in terms of Sidney Torres III's lack of initial fee payments and the
audit's allegations of favoritism, the audit notes that other than the
Torres' filings, all but 1 percent of the remaining civil suits filed during
that period were paid within at least seven days of filing.

Removing files

The legislative audit states that Lena Nunez may have violated state public
records law when, after Sidney Torres III paid the nearly $100,000, she
threw out the records that noted his prior lack of payment.

But Matthews maintains that electronic records were kept for all the
transactions and so the paper copies were not needed and were simply
"reminders."

Matthews states that the pieces of paper that Lena Nunez discarded - "a half
sheet of paper intended as a redundant reminder of a fee balance due" - were
"intended to be a redundant alert for clerk's office personnel that unpaid
fees were due."

"The formal record of the fees, costs, and payments were the computer
records into which all fees and costs, along with any payments, were
recorded," he added. "When the fees and costs were paid, these reminders
were removed as no longer being useful or accurate."

He claims "these reminders were perhaps a vestige of pre-electronic age
practices."

But the legislative auditor's report rebuts Matthews' argument, saying,
"Since the clerk's bills are generated when one or more attempts are made to
collect the court cost owed, and because the bills generated are not
recorded in the accounting software, the physical bills are the only records
of attempted collections of court costs by the clerk."

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said of
the audit: "It really poses another whole layer of questions of whether
there will be a criminal review to determine if any criminal charges are
filed. A prosecutor should review the facts and evidence to determine
whether any criminal laws were broken, and to make sure there are no
conflicts of interest, it should be referred to the Louisiana attorney
general's office, not the local district attorney."