Cheryll Jones was escorted from her office in the Wichita County Annex on Friday, her last day as county auditor, according to the Wichita County Sheriff's Office.
The action came just hours before her term was set to expire and in the wake of county officials being locked out of or deleted from the county’s financial software.
It was not clear Monday if the two incidents were related.
But Chief Deputy Will Rutledge said the Sheriff's Office is looking into the software problem "to see if there's any criminal action or not."
"It's going to take a little while to investigate this," Rutledge said.
The Times Record News reached out to Jones for comment Monday morning. She posted a comment that afternoon on TRN's Facebook page with a response included in a follow-up story on www.timesrecordnews.com .
As of Monday morning, Tax Assessor-Collector Tommy Smyth said his office was still without access to the software. Others also reported being locked out of the system.
In Texas, district judges hire county auditors so they can be independent of the commissioners court, a county’s governing body.
Although Jones applied for a third term, the three district judges in Wichita County chose Matt Davis, a former deputy auditor in the office who mostly recently worked in the private sector. He was sworn in early Monday.
Jones had been appointed in 2020 and had clashed with commissioners on several occasions.
Seventy-eighth District Court Judge Meredith Kennedy said Monday the judicial panel had considered reports of dissatisfaction with her performance among some county officials.
“There had been claims of instances of unprofessional conduct,” Kennedy said.
In April 2024, angry commissioners demanded to know why some poll workers in the March party primaries had not been paid in a timely fashion.
Jones said the delay was due to incomplete paperwork being received in her office.
Later in April, Wichita County Tax Assessor-Collector Tommy Smyth complained some payments the county owed were 253 days late even though the county had been collecting the taxes since December.
Smyth said dispersal of the money was supposed to go through the county Auditor’s Office to be dispersed by the county Treasurer’s Office.
Both the Auditor’s Office and the county Treasurer’s Office came under scrutiny by commissioners in July 2023 when commissioners learned the county had not paid federal taxes on its employees and had incurred penalties.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: UPDATED: Jones escorted from Wichita County Auditor's Office after financial software lockout
Most Popular
Comments / 0