Audit: Clark County Public Administrator’s Office marred by many ‘high risk’ issues

A new audit of the Clark County Public Administrator’s Office found eight “high-risk” issues or instances of mismanagement in the troubled department that deals with people’s estates after they die if they have no next of kin.

Findings included that the department has nearly 1,900 open cases, $623,000 in collected fees it has not handed over to Clark County, an absence of a plan for disposing human cremated remains, non-deposited checks from estates long after the amount of time a bank is required to cash them, as well as lax security around people accessing the inventory collected from the homes of the deceased.

After people in Clark County die without a will or someone to take care of their belongings, their estates — which includes pets, property, vehicles and other belongings — goes to the public administrator’s office, which then figures out how to reallocate or care for their estates. The head of the office is an elected position that serves a four-year term and oversees a roughly $2.5 million annual budget with a staff of 29 part-time and full-time employees.

Auditors said they had asked the public administrator’s office for an action plan to address the findings but had not heard back as of Oct. 22. The audit will be finalized during a county audit committee meeting Wednesday.

The current public administrator, Rita Page Reid, declined The Nevada Independent’s request for comment. She is not running for re-election.

The department has a tumultuous history — former Public Administrator Robert Telles murdered Las Vegas Review-Journal journalist Jeff German in 2022 after he investigated Telles’ conduct.

Now, that history is bubbling to the surface again.

Republican Mike Murphy, the interim administrator during Telles’ last months in office and after his arrest, is running for the office against Deputy Attorney General Stephanie Itkin-Goodman, a Democrat.

In an interview, Murphy said that many of the office’s problems date back to Telles’ leadership and German’s story on Telles creating emotional stress in the office through bullying and favoritism. Telles, who was the public administrator for two years, also had an affair with a subordinate, something he originally denied but later confirmed during his trial for German’s murder.

“Certainly, half of the time was spent with Robert at the helm,” Murphy, the county coroner for 14 years, said of his time in the office.

He said he was brought aboard in May 2022 to address some of the allegations uncovered in German’s article while Telles was still in office. German was murdered in September 2022, and Murphy said he stayed on to deal with the aftermath of the murder, though he said he was not afforded the same power as a standard public administrator.

“High risk” areas of improvement

The audit — spanning from 2024 to 2026 — paints a picture of a department with long delays in processing, unpaid fees, high staff turnover and instances of security lapses that went unnoticed.

According to the audit, the longer a case is open, the more time, money and resources it demands. Belongings sit in storage, “contributing to overcrowded storage areas, increasing the risk of depreciation and requiring additional staff time to manage the inventory.”

The longer a case takes, the harder it can become to contact attorneys, heirs, creditors and other financial institutions, as well as processing any payments on old bank accounts.

During the two-year audit period, the office closed 1,808 cases within an average of 532 days per case. However, some took much longer; 59 percent of all cases have been open for more than two years.

Of the cases still open, most have been ongoing for more than three years, according to the audit; 315 have been open for more than five years, and 34 for more than 10. Authors of the audit recommended a timeline of two years for administrator cases.

More than 147 vehicles are in the public administrator’s possession, several for three years or longer, and are sitting in a parking lot that is almost full. There are more than 4,500 personal property belongings in the public administrator’s possession as well, including high-value items such as firearms and jewelry.

Additionally, 289 checks were in the administrator’s possession, four of them for more than $10,000 each and one for more than $42,000. Several of the checks had been in the possession of the administrator’s office for years without being deposited, forwarded to a next of kin or disposed of.

The office is also in possession of 105 human cremains, a technical term for cremated remains, and six pet cremains. More than half of those are at least 3 years old, with six cremains that are more than a decade old. The county’s crypt, where these remains are kept, is full, which means additional cremains cannot be properly disposed of and forces cases to be left open.

The audit also found that the office regularly failed to conduct timely visits to a decedent’s home after an initial visit, which sometimes meant that property — in one case, a car — had gone missing or been “compromised.”

Throughout the last two years, the department collected $623,000 in fee revenue but did not send it to Clark County, which it had previously been doing but stopped in February 2024. In the audit, the county said that processing fees are necessary for the budget but did not say why the office had stopped forwarding its fees.

Another major concern outlined in the audit was the fact that several people without proper authorization accessed the areas where dead people’s belongings are kept.

The audit also outlined a lack of security oversight for vault technicians, who can currently modify the records of items after they have been stored without supervisors approval or oversight, meaning that vault technicians “with physical inventory access, record-editing privileges, and sole auditing responsibility can easily steal items without detection.”

Future of the department

Both candidates for the public administrator, Murphy and Itkin-Goodman, said in separate interviews they were concerned with the findings of the audit.

“I think it has provided a roadmap for the next public administrator to come in and take it to the next level, and to follow the guidelines of the audit,” Murphy said about the findings. He said he was aware of some of the issues raised by the audit during his 11-month stint as interim administrator, but he did not have the authority to address it at the time.

However, Itkin-Goodman sees it differently.

“My opponent was brought in to help manage those long-standing problems,” Itkin-Goodman said during an interview. “His promise to finish what they started is precisely why this office needs independent leadership and fundamental reform, which is what I bring.”

Both candidates also expressed concern about the finding that unauthorized people, including someone who was not Clark County staff, were getting access to the inventory of deceased individuals. To solve this issue, Murphy suggested requiring body cams, while Itkin-Goodman said the lack of safety was a “failure.”

“The work begins on Day 1 with the county’s audit as our roadmap,” Itkin-Goodman said on her plan to address the issues in the office. “Immediate safeguards and a corrective action plan, with clear deadlines.”

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This story was originally published by The Nevada Independent and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.