The Mississippi Electronic Court system designed to create easier public access to court records was not fully or correctly implement under jailed former Circuit Clerk Shelly Ashley-Palmertree despite Warren County joining the program in 2010, Circuit Clerk Jan Daigre told Port City Kiwanis last week.

“Everything in MEC is wrong. Your court documents for this county are incorrect, so we’re going back and cleaning them up,” Daigre said.

The Mississippi Electronic Courts system was implemented under Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice William Waller Jr. five years ago. Waller had said he wanted the program running fully here by 2012. Yet data was not put in correctly and the circuit clerk’s office recently finished a two-week training on the system, Daigre said.

“Shelly really wasn’t that interested in it. Whenever you get into a computer system, it tracks everything you do,” Daigre said. “In the employees’ defense they were not trained correctly. Shelly really didn’t want them in there so she resisted.”

Palmertree is serving a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement after pleading guilty in two embezzlement cases — one in Septmeber and another in March — in which she stole more than $115,000 in fines, fees and restitution that passed through her office.

“I thought it could be straight in five months. One of the women at lunch the other day told me it might be 10 years because there is five years of dirty data,” Daigre said of the errors in the court records. “We’re cleaning up a lot with just the court system. I haven’t even touched elections yet.”

Under Palmertree, records were scanned into the electronic system, entered into another system and finally printed.

“The whole point of MEC was to go paperless, but when someone files it in this electronic system it is the official document. When we get it on our screen, we print it out, which defeats the whole system,” Daigre said. “The attic’s full. The basement’s full. When you talk to Huey Purvis who does our records, a square foot of space is in high demand.”

Cleaning up the records left by previous administrations has been nonstop, Daigre said.

“I’m one of those people who make a list and check things off. I never check anything off at the courthouse because you can never finish. It’s just mind-boggling,” she said.

Daigre also told the club that she had completed her first audit, which had a negative balance because it only covered two months of court collections.

“I took out a personal loan to pay all my employees for December and January because when we started January 1, I started out with an account with $0, but my employees needed a paycheck on the 15th,” she said.

In November, Daigre won a special election over interim clerk Greg Peltz. She and Peltz will square off for the office again this November.