DARTMOUTH — A preliminary report on sheriffs’ budgets and expenditures released Feb. 27 by the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General found that the Commonwealth’s 14 sheriffs’ offices ran a combined Fiscal Year 2025 deficit of about $110 million after reserve and other net transfers were accounted for, down from an initially reported $162.4 million. The report also found that Bristol County was among the offices that spent more than their budget appropriation in fiscal years 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The report, authored by Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro, says that deficit grew out of a budget system in which the Commonwealth routinely underfunds sheriffs’ offices in the General Appropriations Act, then later closes the gap through supplemental budgets and reserve transfers.
“The budgeting problem begins in the Commonwealth’s General Appropriations Act (GAA),” Shapiro wrote in the report. “The OIG found that the Commonwealth routinely underfunds sheriffs’ offices in the GAA, with the understanding that sheriffs will be made whole during the supplemental budget process at the end of the fiscal year. In essence, this means that sheriffs have no budget because of the understanding that the shortfall will be offset in the supplemental budget.”
According to the OIG, sheriffs have been allowed to spend above their appropriations with the approval of the Legislature and the Executive Office for Administration and Finance, leaving them without a known budget ceiling at the start of the fiscal year. The report called that process “opaque, chaotic, and deeply flawed.”
Bristol County Sheriff Paul Heroux said that process creates the very deficit figures now being used to criticize sheriffs.
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“OIG said the process is the problem, but the sheriffs have had to abide by the process the legislature does year after year and that is to not fully fund us with the promise that we will get the rest of the funding we need later,” Heroux said.
Heroux has described Bristol Counrty’s deficit as artificial, arguing that the office was not fully funded up front and was expected to receive the balance later. NBC 10 reported that the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office spent $75.4 million last fiscal year, about $10 million over budget, and is projected to run a deficit again this year.
Heroux said Bristol County should be viewed differently from sheriff’s offices that fund broader programs outside corrections.
“Bristol County is a little bit of an outlier in that it doesn’t do anything outside of corrections,” Heroux said. “I cut $3 million of non-corrections spending back in 2023.”
He added, “When the OIG says it falls on both the legislature and the sheriffs, Bristol County is an outlier because we don’t do any non-corrections related expenses.”
Heroux also said much of the budgetary pressure comes from legislatively mandated costs that are not fully funded in the initial budget.
“There are numerous things that they approve funding for, and some are even mandated that they did not give us in that budget,” he said.
The OIG report points to several of those pressures, including no-cost inmate calling, medication-assisted treatment and collective bargaining. It says reserve transfers included funding for those items and that sheriffs and A&F have incompatible understandings about the extent to which the Commonwealth will reimburse certain mandated expenditures.
“There is a difference between wants and needs and the needs are corrections related and the legislature considers non-corrections related stuff as wants,” Heroux said. “And the sheriffs consider non-corrections related stuff as actually a need—for example, the Are You OK program or Project Lifesaver programs—while several sheriffs do that, the legislature says it is a want.”
Heroux added that he “doesn’t do anything outside of corrections.”