Olmsted County Sheriff's Office

What the audit said

GHOST FINDING — a problem the audit describes but never records. Marked compliant with zero findings, yet the narrative notes the office had not been maintaining a standard set of Log of Use reports, a Minn. Stat. 13.824 subd. 5 requirement, in the now-retired BOSS system. No formal discrepancy was recorded and MNSec offered to assist with future systems. Rated as no findings because that is what the report records; flagged as a major issue because the described gap appears to violate the statute. See FinePrint feed: The ghost findings of Minnesota's ALPR audits.

What the audit said

One recorded exception: the Sheriff's Office ALPR policy did not fully address two statutory requirements — (1) preservation of data on written request from an individual facing criminal charges who states the data may be exculpatory evidence, and (2) destruction of data on request from a participant in the Minn. Stat. ch. 5B (Safe at Home) address-confidentiality program. Joint agreed-upon-procedures engagement covering Olmsted County SO and Rochester PD; no exception was recorded against Rochester.

FinePrint notes

2026-09-17 weekly rotation. Surfaced while hunting Rochester PD — this is the Olmsted County half of the same joint OSA report (LRL 201206). Third Olmsted row; companions are LRL 250871 (2025 MNSec, clean) and 250872 (2024 MNSec UTILITY, clean with a public-log ghost finding). Deduped against both — different report, different auditor, different cycle. Scoring judgment call: the single exception is tiered Material rather than Superficial. It reads as a policy-wording gap, which the calibration normally puts in Superficial, but the two unaddressed requirements go to who can compel preservation or destruction of their own plate data — including Safe at Home (ch. 5B) participants, i.e. domestic-violence and stalking victims whose address confidentiality is the whole point of the program. That is retention control for the most exposed population the statute contemplates, so it lands on the Material side. Revisit if a later report gives a closer precedent. Editorial note worth carrying: Olmsted's record now reads as one recorded exception from the Office of the State Auditor in 2020, then two clean sheets from MNSec in 2024 and 2025 — one of which carries a ghost finding. Same agency, same statute, different auditors, opposite outcomes. This is the cleanest natural experiment in the table for the audit-mill thesis.