Erath County employee out of job after audit shows more than $500K was inappropriately spent.
- Sara Vanden Berge
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 23 hours ago
A long-time Erath County employee is out of a job following revelations that more than $500,000 of taxpayer money was inappropriately spent on the indigent health program.
The state healthcare program gives indigent residents who qualify up to $30,000 in covered medical expenses paid directly to healthcare providers.
“In March 2025, we started noticing irregularities in the amounts hitting the budget; in fact, it was causing the budget to go over,” Erath County auditor Kent Reeves told Beneath the Surface News.
“When I saw this, I started digging into it and began seeing big overages. I told the county judge that something was going on.”
From there, Reeves said, the county contacted the outside software provider to gain access to the files, setting off an investigation.
What it showed, he said, was that $530,000 was overpaid over a three-year period.
“What that means is that we exceeded that $30,000 state cap by $530,000,” Reeves said.
“She (the employee) submitted over $500,000 to be paid without approval from the court.”
An audit by BMY also showed that out of 25 files examined by the firm’s auditors, 20 lacked the state eligibility requirements to qualify, skyrocketing the overpaid amount to $700,000.
The former employee reportedly told county officials that she was given permission to pay the extra amounts by commissioners Dee Stephens and Albert Ray and former commissioner Joe Brown.
“But they had no authority to do that,” Reeves said, adding that commissioners Sherman Edwards and Jim Buck “had nothing to do with it.”
In 2019, commissioners voted to remove oversight of the indigent healthcare program from the county judge’s office to oversee it themselves.
“We have to ensure that we protect taxpayer money by following proper procedures,” Erath County Judge Brandon Huckabee said.
“We now have procedures in place to prevent something like this from ever happening again and that employee is no longer with the county.”
