Plymouth County Closed FY25 Nearly $17 Million in the Red as Inspector General Faults “Chaotic” Sheriff Spending Statewide
BOSTON - June 1 - The Massachusetts Inspector General’s final report on sheriffs’ budgets, released June 1, lands hard on a system the office calls “chaotic,” marked by “chronic underfunding and illegal overspending.” The Commonwealth’s 14 sheriffs collectively closed Fiscal Year 2025 with a historic $110 million deficit. The Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office accounted for nearly $17 million of that shortfall — the third-largest in the state — and the report singles out Plymouth’s discretionary law enforcement spending, including its Bureau of Criminal Investigation, as an area where the office “could spend without restraint” and blame the gap on underfunding.
The Full Story
The final report builds on the OIG’s February 27 preliminary review and supplements rather than replaces it. Where the preliminary report sounded the alarm, the final report documents the scale of the problem in granular detail across all 14 county sheriffs’ offices and lays out a four-stage roadmap — immediate, short-term, medium-term, and long-term — for fixing it by Fiscal Year 2029.
The top-line numbers are striking. In FY25, the sheriffs collectively spent $887.8 million, roughly $110 million more than they were appropriated through the state budget, reserve accounts, and transfers combined. Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro frames the root cause as a structural one: there is no shared understanding of what a sheriff’s office is actually supposed to do. “What is abundantly clear is that their role is not as narrow as some legislative leaders expect, nor as expansive as some sheriffs believe,” the report states.
The OIG identifies several mechanisms that allowed the overspending to continue for years. The Executive Office for Administration and Finance (A&F) and the Comptroller permitted sheriffs to transfer money out of their payroll accounts to spend elsewhere, knowing payroll would still be covered under state labor law and that the resulting deficit would be cleaned up later through a supplemental budget. Statewide, sheriffs moved a net $77 million out of payroll accounts in FY25 alone. The report also documents extensive financial activity happening entirely outside the state accounting system: more than 120 private bank accounts holding over $36 million at the close of FY25, with more than $42 million in expenditures flowing through them during the year. Only 15 of those accounts had been disclosed to and approved by the State Treasurer, as state law requires.
