A.G. Gancarski
The Duval County Clerk of Courts is allowed to use the Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles database known as DAVID.
And a report from the Jacksonville City Council Auditor delineates that one of 15 employees with such access abused it.
The DAVID system houses confidential information of drivers and is supposed to be used for “research or confirmation purposes only.”
However, one employee ran afoul of regulations.
“We found evidence that an employee at Clerk of Courts appears to have misused the DAVID system on multiple occasions. This employee performed 25 searches on eight different individuals including themselves that appear to be unauthorized. These searches were of their spouse, siblings, a parent and others,” the auditor’s report asserted.
“We were unable to find any public records in the Duval County Clerk of Courts website (such as a traffic ticket, a misdemeanor or felony case connected to these individuals) that would justify these searches done by the employee as business related,” the report added.
The Clerk of Courts office reported the misuse to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and the employee’s access to the system was terminated. JSO deemed the infraction to be civil rather than criminal.
In the Jacksonville City Council Finance Committee Wednesday morning, Council Auditor Kirk Sherman noted “very strict limitations” on access imposed by the state, describing the illicit searches as “family-related.”
Another issue in the audit: an “employee who resigned on May 30, 2014 but whose access to the DAVID system was not removed until November 8, 2016. This employee had access to the database for 893 days after the employment was terminated at the Clerk of Courts.”
The Clerk of Courts recommended stronger internal controls in the office, run by Christian Right darling Ronnie Fussell — best known outside of Duval County for ending courthouse weddings a day before same-sex marriage became the law of the land.
