“We are in compliance,” the sheriff testifies; a deputy undersheriff told the court an audit found $20 million in sale proceeds for which checks had not been written

At a two-day hearing before Common Pleas Court Judge Paula Patrick that began September 30, 2026, deputy undersheriff Steven Wakefield, hired in June, testified that an internal audit had found about $20 million in sheriff-sale proceeds for which “checks had not been written,” including uncollected property taxes and water bills meant to be recouped through sheriff sales. “A lot of that was money that was supposed to go to the city,” Wakefield said. The Inquirer’s William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs reported that the sum is more than half the office’s annual budget. The audit has so far gone back only as far as August 2025. Wakefield did not explain why the money had remained in the office and said it had recently been transferred to the city. Judge Patrick asked why the information was not in the records she had ordered the office to produce over the summer.

The hearing came as Bilal and her staff sought to back out of the agreement reached in August, under which Bilal’s staff agreed to allow an outside entity to monitor the auctions and report back to the court in six months. According to Daniel Bernheim, the lawyer for plaintiff JSB Property Group, the office proposed changes to the judge’s draft order that included 48 hours’ notice before the supervisor could interview any employee, removal of the word “comprehensive” before “review,” and automatic termination of the supervision after six months regardless of whether any improvements are made. Jonathan Rardin, a lawyer the city retained to represent Bilal, argued in a memo that the 2003 consent order requiring deeds within 40 days of settlement does not apply to Bilal because it was brought against a previous sheriff, John Green, and that the court’s authority was in any case limited to holding her in contempt.

When her testimony continued on October 1, Bilal was asked whether she would permit an outside compliance examiner to confirm that sheriff sales had been fixed. She did not answer the question. “We are in compliance,” she said. “We got control of this.”