10/08/2018
The Missouri State Auditor's Office released the following statement on the response by the Missouri's Sheriffs' Association to the audit of Missouri's sexual offender registration (SOR) program:
It's unfortunate that the Sheriffs' Association decided to weigh in this way. During the audit process, audit staff met with the head of the Missouri Sheriffs' Association to seek information and input about issues noted in the report, but the association ultimately "declined" to provide any responses to those inquiries.
The Sex Offender Registry is administered by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Local law enforcement, typically the county sheriff, is responsible for providing accurate information to the sex offender registry for their jurisdiction. The information contained in the audit was obtained from the Missouri State Highway Patrol on February 14 and May 23 of this year.
The purpose of a centralized registry is so the public can rely on a single resource to access information about registered sex offenders in their community and make informed decisions for their families. Based on the response from the association, there are sheriffs who have information not updated or included in the publicly available tool. If this audit spurs those officials to update and provide that information to the public, then that is a positive result.
The full audit of the sexual offender registration program can be found here.
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