Court Clerk Closeout Reconciliation

Court clerk closeout & reconciliation

These tasks give you (a) local materials that are explicitly unreliable — bench/hearing notes with shorthand, draft worksheets, finance-queue imports, petition intake sheets, form excerpts — and (b) an authoritative court records portal (read-only lookups for cases, charges, docket entries, citations, fee schedules, payment policies, forms, financial petitions). Your job is to reconcile them into one JSON object that exactly matches the task's answer_template.json.

The core skill is knowing which source wins for which field, catching stale/draft artifacts, refusing to invent or over-charge, and getting the arithmetic and formatting exactly right.

Workflow

1. Read the prompt + answer_template.json first. The template defines the required top-level keys, the shape of each list item, every enum's allowed values, sort orders, and currency/date formats. Build your answer to that contract — never emit prose where an enum value is required.
2. Read every local payload. Note which values are flagged as draft, carried forward, archived, "old worksheet," "ready to post," etc. — those are suspects.
3. Pull the authoritative record for each target case / citation / petition from the portal (identity, counsel, status, charges, and the relevant fee-schedule, payment-policy, and form rows for that jurisdiction). Match by the identifier the task gives you; read the whole collection and filter locally rather than probing.
4. Reconcile field by field using the source-of-truth rules below.
5. Compute fees, totals, and any payment schedule with the arithmetic rules below; re-derive, don't copy the draft numbers.
6. Format and sort exactly as the template says, then self-check against the pre-submission checklist.

Source-of-truth rules (who wins)

• System-of-record portal case data wins for identity and standing: legal name, date of birth, counsel type & attorney, case status, and the structured charge fields. A finance queue / worksheet that disagrees is usually a stale import — correct it to the portal value.
• Hearing / bench notes win for what actually happened in the courtroom: the plea entered, whether guilt was adjudicated, the pronounced sentence (fine, jail imposed/suspended, probation), amendments, and whether a final order was signed. Trust them over stale worksheet outcomes ("Dismissed", "draft guilty plea", pre-amendment charges).
• When a portal charge row looks corrupted or mismatched (e.g., a statute or offense label that clearly doesn't fit the offense described in court), prefer the hearing notes for the substantive offense/severity, and let the courtroom facts drive derived fields (e.g., felony-vs-misdemeanor treatment).
• Current fee schedule wins for amounts. Draft/archived amounts on worksheets are for audit history only.
• A corroborating memo (e.g., a defense cover memo) can resolve a conflict that both the queue got wrong and the notes only hint at.
• An unsigned/continued order means "hold" — the courtroom record beats any draft disposition sheet that assumed the case closed.
• Record each conflict you resolve as an audit finding: the conflicted value, the corrected value, and which source resolved it.

Stale / draft artifacts to catch

• Old fee amounts. Use the schedule row whose effective_date ≤ the disposition/hearing date and whose end_date is null or ≥ that date. Ignore ended rows even if a worksheet still cites them.
• Spurious sentencing departures. Only record a departure if the courtroom actually pronounced one. "Top of the range" / "within the plea-agreement cap" means no departure. Legacy "dispositional/durational departure" text carried from a draft worksheet should be corrected to no-departure unless the judge confirmed a departure. Departures are a felony concept — for misdemeanors use the "not evaluated (misdemeanor)" value; for pending/continued matters use the "not entered / pending" value.
• Pre-amendment charges. If a count was amended to a different charge, the conviction is the amended charge. Count the amended-away original as a dismissed/amended-away count, and drop any fee that only attached to the original charge (see crime-lab fee below).
• Draft dispositions on unsigned orders / continued matters — see "Held".

Fees: apply only what is supported

Never add a fee that no current schedule row, portal record, or triggering event/order supports. Typical fees to exclude unless directly supported: account-management/maintenance, collection/referral, late-payment, DMV/notice/ reinstatement, returned-check, traffic-school, copy/certification, restitution (when none was ordered), court-reporter, and court-appointed-attorney fees. When the template asks you to list excluded items, list each with the reason it fails (stale schedule, not in the hearing order, no triggering event occurred, not current policy, unsupported post-disposition). An obsolete "service charge" in an old form footer is not current policy — exclude it and record the applied amount as 0.

Gating rules that recur:

• Public-defender user fee: apply only when counsel_type is public_defender. Never for appointed-private or retained counsel.
• Crime-lab / drug assessment fee: apply only to a controlled-substance conviction count. If the drug count was amended away to a non-drug charge, there is no lab fee even if a worksheet still lists one. If the judge reminded the clerk of the lab assessment on a CS conviction, it is due even if the worksheet omitted it.
• Mandatory court costs apply to a disposed case; a waived fine is 0.

Held / pending / deferred / continued matters

If no final order was signed (matter continued, deferred, plea paperwork incomplete, status issue raised), then: do not post financials, do not enter a disposition, use the "hold" / "exclude / no final order" actions and statuses, set the disposition date to null, set posted amounts to 0, mark financial posting not allowed, capture the next-setting date as the status check, and exclude the matter from register/batch totals (count it separately as held/excluded).

Identity & placeholders — never invent

• Do not invent identifiers or contact details. For a form field that is required but genuinely absent from all materials (SSN, address, phone, driver-license number, probation officer/office), use the exact placeholder string the materials specify (commonly TBD from case file), and — where the template has a placeholder list — record the field name and a reason.
• Never borrow a value (e.g., a DOB) from a similarly-named party in search results. A genuinely missing DOB becomes the placeholder plus a verify-before-permanent-entry flag; the disposition can still post with the placeholder if the order was signed.
• When the portal has the correct identity/counsel and a queue/worksheet has a wrong one, correct to the portal value.

Payment plans & installment math

Read the jurisdiction's payment policy row for: monthly min/max band, down-payment requirement, account fee, first_due_days, return_to_court_offset_days, and restitution priority.

• total_due = fines-and-costs balance + restitution balance + any policy-supported account fee. Restitution is part of the balance the plan pays off. If the policy's account fee is 0 (or the noted fee isn't current policy), the applied account-fee amount is 0 and total_due excludes it.
• Approved monthly amount: approve the requested amount when it is inside the policy min/max band and affordable from disposable income (income − obligations). Classify support accordingly (supportable / below-minimum / above-maximum / unsupported-by-budget). A plan being set up means the petitioner is not "exempt / no payment."
• Installment breakdown (see references/installment_math.md for a worked, value-free template):
  • full_installments = floor(total_due / monthly)
  • remainder = total_due − full_installments × monthly
  • if remainder > 0, there is one extra final installment equal to the remainder; total_installments = full_installments + 1 and final_payment_amount = remainder. If it divides evenly, the final payment equals the regular installment and there is no extra one.
• Payment application order: if restitution > 0 and policy is restitution-first → restitution-before-fines/costs; if there is no restitution → fines/costs-only.

Dates (these patterns are consistent)

• first_due_date = submission/order date + policy first_due_days.
• Installments fall monthly on that same day-of-month.
• final_due_date = first_due_date + (total_installments − 1) months.
• return_to_court_date = final_due_date + policy return_to_court_offset_days (a day offset, not months).
• A return-to-court trigger for a current (non-default) first installment order is nonpayment, not a scheduled default review.

License suspension & probation referral (field-packet forms)

• License suspension start = the conviction date. A release-from-confinement date is memo context only and does not replace the conviction date for the suspension consequence. suspension_end_date = start + suspension_months. Basis is the conviction type (e.g., DUI conviction).
• Probation referral: prepare it only if supervised probation was actually ordered by a signed referral form. If no referral order was signed, mark it not-ordered, term 0, and no report datetime — even if a portal field still carries a scheduled report time.
• Form identity/labels: use the portal form's form_id. For a free-string form-label field, use the portal form's label value (the short official label), not the long descriptive form name. When the template restricts the label to enum/allowed values, use those verbatim. When a "labels used" list is requested, include all of the form's structural labels.

Output discipline

• Emit exactly the required top-level keys and item shapes; use enum values verbatim (never paraphrase into prose).
• Currency: numbers to two decimals. Dates: ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Datetimes: ISO local YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS. Times: HH:MM.
• Apply the template's sort orders (usually by case/citation/petition identifier ascending; sub-lists such as missing-fields or excluded-items alphabetically).
• Totals sum only the posted/disposed matters. Held/excluded matters contribute 0 to money totals and are counted in the separate held/excluded count. Re-derive each total from your per-matter numbers and confirm the grand total equals the sum of per-matter totals.

Pre-submission checklist

• Every top-level key from the template is present; every enum value is one of the allowed values.
• Identity/counsel/status come from the authoritative record; courtroom facts (plea, outcome, sentence, amendments, order-signed) come from the notes.
• Fee amounts use the schedule row effective on the disposition date; no unsupported fees added; PD-user fee only for public defenders; lab fee only for a CS conviction that wasn't amended away.
• Held/continued/unsigned matters: no disposition, no financials, disposition date null, excluded from totals, next-setting captured.
• Missing required identifiers use the exact placeholder string; nothing invented or borrowed.
• total_due includes restitution; account fee = policy-supported amount (often 0); installment/remainder split and all four derived dates recomputed.
• Currency 2dp, ISO dates/datetimes, arrays sorted, totals equal the sum of per-matter amounts.