Days before Brad McCullouch would be appointed the Hinds County district attorney in July, he sat down in a tan Shaquille O’Neal executive chair in a mostly empty corner office on the fifth floor of the Hinds County Courthouse.
Prompted by a public records request from Mississippi Today, McCullouch decided to look for financial and payroll records. He tried to find invoices, accounting software, usernames and passwords for the office’s bank accounts, and audits.
What he found instead, he said, was a black three-ring binder of checks that date back to January 2026.
The apparent lack of recordkeeping was one reason McCullouch said he asked the state auditor’s office to review the Hinds DA’s finances under former Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, who pleaded guilty in June to a federal corruption charge and left office soon after.
“I’m realizing that it’s basically one person who is paying all the bills, and I’m thinking, ‘We need somebody to look at all this,’” McCullouch said.
Patchwork of financial oversight
The siloed documentation persisted due in part to a system of patchwork financial oversight for district attorney offices in Mississippi. Regulatory agencies that are supposed to receive financial reports complain of a lack of enforcement power, and accountability depends on the initiative of a particular district attorney.
Once completed, McCullouch’s requested review will be the first audit of the Hinds DA’s office the auditor’s office has recorded since at least 2013, according to Jacob Walters, a spokesperson for the auditor.
District attorneys in Mississippi also face no penalties if they do not notify the state treasury of the existence of bank accounts holding public money, even though state law says district attorneys should file an annual report with this information.
The Hinds DA’s office has not filed such a report to the state treasurer’s office since 2017, according to a treasury spokesperson.
Along with audits, these filings are among the few mechanisms that exist in Mississippi to hold district attorneys accountable for how they spend self-generated funds, such as drug seizure money or fees from pre-trial intervention programs.
These reports also would have been useful to McCullouch. In his role as Owens’ second-in-command, the Madison attorney said he knew of a few bank accounts the office had at Trustmark, because he was a co-signor.
Brad McCullouch, a Madison attorney appointed by Gov. Tate Reeves as Hinds County district attorney in July, discusses proposals he believes could reduce crowding at the jail. Credit: Molly Minta/Mississippi TodayAfter taking the reins, McCullouch went to Trustmark with an assistant district attorney, who suggested he ask the bank for all the DA’s accounts.
That’s how he learned the DA’s office had seven accounts at Trustmark, some of which McCullouch didn’t know about.
McCullouch said he hopes to have an independent audit of the office completed by the time he leaves his post after the Nov. 3 special election.
In a text message to Mississippi Today, Owens wrote that he paid for an independent audit of his office so he could provide a copy to the Mississippi State Health Department as part of a grant application. Mississippi Today has not retrieved that audit from MSDH by press time.
“To my knowledge there was no independent audits done in our office in the four years before I was elected,” Owens wrote.
The missing audits and treasurer reports for the Hinds DA’s office span the terms of two district attorneys in Hinds County, Owens and his predecessor, the late Robert Shuler Smith.
Smith, who served as Hinds DA from 2008 to 2019, also drew legal scrutiny during his controversial tenure. The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office unsuccessfully pursued various criminal charges against Smith for years, notably accusing him of illegally advising criminal defendants.
But office paperwork was disorganized under Smith, some former prosecutors told Mississippi Today. Paper files routinely went missing. When Owens was elected in 2019, he implemented an online case management system.
Records from 2021 and 2024 show that Owens followed reporting requirements for state funding for prosecutor salary supplements by responding to emails from a Department of Finance and Administration employee who was checking which offices were receiving the extra pay.
Dearth of documents
It is difficult to say how much money is under the purview of the Hinds DA’s office, because of the complexity of the funding for district attorney offices in Mississippi and the dearth of documents. That’s one reason why an audit could be so useful in understanding the finances of one of the most powerful institutions in public life, said Amanda Beck, an accounting professor at Georgia State University who specializes in government auditing.
“It’s public property so the public deserves to know how that money has been spent,” she said.
District attorney’s offices in Mississippi are funded through a mix of state, county and self-generated money. Oversight exists for state and county funds: District attorneys must report how they spend this money to the state Department of Finance and Administration or to local county governments.
But virtually no such enforceable checks and balances exist for self-generated funds, due to the loopholes in state law. Unlike other public funds, this money is solely managed and overseen by the district attorney’s office.
Plus, little guidance exists for district attorneys in Mississippi on how to comply with state regulations. Stephanie Wood, the current president of the Mississippi Prosecutor’s Association, said the organization does not provide training to district attorneys on how to comply with state oversight laws.
Hal Kittrell, a longtime district attorney in the 15th Circuit Court District in south Mississippi, said his office voluntarily pays for an independent audit every year. He doesn’t know why or when the audits started. He said it is just something the office has always done, ever since Kittrell was an assistant district attorney nearly 30 years ago.
“There’s 23 DAs and 23 ways of doing things,” he said.
The patchwork oversight for district attorneys means just one person knows the whole scope of a district attorney’s finances: The district attorney, said Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican from Pascagoula who chairs the Senate Judiciary A Committee.
“If you have never served (as a district attorney) you don’t know and would never know how those funds come in and what would go out,” Wiggins said.
Audits required but not always done
Because district attorneys receive state funding, Mississippi statute requires the auditor’s office to audit district attorney’s offices.
While state law mandates the auditor’s office to annually audit state government offices, the law does not specify a schedule for district attorney offices. The law also does not provide for a punishment if district attorney’s offices fail to obtain or file audits.
“There’s no penalty if it’s not getting done, so it’s basically not a law,” said Walters, the auditor’s spokesperson.
When Walters opened a filing cabinet containing audits of district attorneys’ offices in Mississippi to check for records, the folders for other offices contained multiple documents. But he said the folder for the Hinds DA’s office contained just one – a contract for a 2013 audit.
The audit, however, was never filed with the auditor’s office.
David Ewing, the owner of the accounting firm that signed the 2013 contract, said he couldn’t find the final copy of the report in his files, which led him to speculate the audit wasn’t submitted to the auditor’s office because it was never completed. He said his firm hasn’t attempted to audit the Hinds DA’s office since 2013.
Without more stringent requirements, the state auditor relies on district attorneys to self-report suspected wrongdoing in their offices. Past instances of financial crimes involving district attorney employees often involve the office’s self-generated funds.
Since fiscal year 2018, the auditor has taken enforcement action in just two cases against district attorney’s offices, according to a review of the auditor’s annual reports. Both instances involved DA employees embezzling from the office’s self-generated funds.
Walters said some funding for district attorneys is covered by audits of county governments. But these can be out of The most recent audit the state auditor has on file for Hinds County was in 2022.
All eyes on Hinds DA audit
Kittrell said he thinks district attorneys across the state will be looking for the outcome of the Hinds DA audit so they can ensure their independent audits are up to par. He noted that the elected offices are unique compared to other government entities in Mississippi, since district attorneys are not quite state offices, but not local agencies, either.
“We’re kind of an oddity among any agency that I know,” he said.
District attorneys are not only virtually unchecked in how they spend their self-generated funds. Mississippi’s top prosecutors are also given special powers to pick and choose crimes to prosecute in their circuit court.
This power wasn’t lost on Owens: He frequently remarked on it to undercover FBI agents who were investigating him. At least one comment that made it into the 2024 federal indictment bore resemblance to McCullouch’s recent realization after his search for financial records turned up short.
“I’m not trying to overemphasize this, you guys, but my ability to prosecute people… there’s only one me,” Owens was quoted saying in the indictment.
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