St. Louis Comptroller Donna Baringer says she has referred the findings of an internal audit of the city’s tow lot to federal prosecutors.
“The old way of doing business is over,” Baringer said in a statement released Friday, adding that she made the decision to send the matter to federal prosecutors after talking to the internal auditor and city counselor.
In a letter to Hal Goldsmith, the assistant U.S. attorney who handles public corruption cases in the Eastern District of Missouri, Baringer called it her “fiduciary duty to formally report these matters, which could potentially constitute criminal offenses.”
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office would not confirm or deny that it had received Baringer’s letter or that an investigation was ongoing.
The internal audit covered a period from July 1, 2022, and Sept. 31, 2024. It noted several findings that were all considered “high-risk,” meaning issues that were fundamentally important to internal controls and needed to be fixed as soon as possible.
Chief among them was an $86,000 discrepancy between reports from the regional criminal justice information sharing network known as REJIS and the city’s internal accounting system. The report also found missing tow tickets and a poorly maintained vehicle inventory, including more than 500 vehicles that were listed in state records but could not be found in the city’s.
Previous audits dating back to 2018 had also found problems with accounting procedures.
