By Mike DeNardo

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Philadelphia’s city controller says thousands of dollars in uncashed jury checks are hung up in the wrong account.

These are funds to cover $9-a-day jury duty checks that were never cashed.

According to city controller Alan Butkovitz, an audit has found $92,000 worth of uncashed checks from 2006 to 2008 that were never transferred to the city’s Unclaimed Monies Fund.

“The harm is that there are all of these outstanding checks that the city — or, the courts, in this case — thinks have been cashed and they have not.  So there’s a strong chance that that money can be stolen by people who have no right to the money,” Butkovitz said today.

Butkovitz says the First Judicial District was keeping track of the outstanding checks the old-fashioned way — on paper adding machine tapes.   The district responds that it is now depositing all unclaimed money within one year, as required, and it’s establishing an electronic record.

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