Has anyone been asked by their treasurers about how to comply with the recent AG opinion regarding commissioners court approval of all payrolls prior to payment? What has been the practice here and in other smaller counties has been they would make payroll and then the court would approve after the fact. This AG opinion states this practice is backwards, and the court must approve before payroll. The question now is whether the court could do some type of estimated pre-approval, in order to avoid scheduling additional meetings just for approving payroll. Something like "we approve the treasurer to do payroll up to X amount on X date" in advance. One of our neighboring counties is doing this, so I wanted to see if this is a common practice now.

I have had the same question. It is apparently a very hot topic on the county judge and treasurers listservs. My county is going to continue to do things as we always have for the present on the theory that the Court approves the budget which includes amounts for salaries and estimates for hourly wages for the entire year. Then the Court ratifies the payroll after the actual numbers are in.

I have been told by other officials that the opinion is causing enough chaos that it could well be withdrawn or clarified.

We are debating the same issue here. My understanding is that the Treasurers Assoc is operating under the premise that the opinion only applies to counties with populations under 190,000 and everyone else is business as usual.

Anyone else getting any feedback on this? Our Auditor is refusing to issue payroll.

Our court meets twice per month so normally this will not cause a problem. For the few instances that will create a problem we just scheduled an additional meeting for them to approve the payroll.