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The latest St John the Baptist Clerk of Court audit has revealed numerous problems with the court’s bookkeeping associated with its past administration, according to a state audit released this month.

Auditors found out that for 82 months, between Dec. 2017 and Dec. 2023, the yearly fiscal audits were always filed 5 to 35 months after the end of the fiscal year—this means there was less time to fix problems from one year to the next.  

The problems identified in the 2020 fiscal year were also present in the 2021, 2022, and 2023 audits filed this year. The internal audit uncovered gaps in oversight where the Clerk’s office paid two vendors $285,709 to provide accounting services from January 2017 to October 2023, without verifying the work was performed as agreed. 

Troy Williams was hired by then Clerk of Court Eliana DeFrancesch to perform all accounting and internal auditing services for the court’s yearly audits, first as an employee of Global Profit Strategies, then later as the owner of Bilal Tax and Accounting. 

The audit report showed that Williams falsely presented himself as a Certified Public Accountant, CPA and senior partner of the firm Global Profit Strategies. Checks into the Louisiana and California boards of accountancy had no record of Williams being licensed or certificated, in both states.

Other finding in the audit stated that Williams did not complete the work the Clerk’s office paid him to do or did not complete it timely, charged more fees than agreed and the Clerk’s office incurred a total excess of $2,100 above the agreed-upon monthly rate of $4,300.

The auditors said DeFrancesch may have violated state law due to seven consecutive late audits of the Clerk’s office accounting records while she was Clerk of court and by continuing to pay Williams without conducting a background check of his credentials. 

The misappropriation at the Clerk’s office between  caused revenue losses which will be investigated and officials indicted in the audit were yet to be charged to court, current Clerk of court, Felicia Feist said. “I have engaged an attorney to investigate the findings of the audit and look at ways we can recover funds that were missing”, she said.

William’s work came under scrutiny when the Louisiana Legislative Auditor and an independent auditor were unable to reconcile his reports on the court’s finances in 2020. 

In Oct. 2023, he was arrested by Louisiana State Police and booked with felony public payroll fraud, second-degree injuring public records, threatening a public official and posing as a certified public accountant. He was released after meeting a $30,000 bond.

Feist in a letter to the State’s auditor also said, now that an audit had been submitted by the deadline, problems detected in previous audits would be corrected before the next audit.