Court Closeout Reconciliation

Court Closeout & Post-Disposition Reconciliation

What this skill is for

A family of court-clerk tasks. Each gives you: a prompt.txt naming a court, a set of target matters (case / citation / petition IDs), and a deliverable; a set of local payloads/ (notes, extracts, worksheets, form excerpts, an answer_template.json); and network access to a Court Operations Portal described in environment_access.md.

Your job is always the same shape: treat the local materials as unverified drafts, verify and correct them against the authoritative portal, drop anything unsupported, do the financial math, and return one JSON object that matches answer_template.json exactly. The specific fields, enums, and matters differ every time; the method below does not.

Core principle

Local materials (queue extracts, worksheets, bench shorthand, calendars, draft sheets, obsolete footers) are carry-forward drafts and may be wrong. Authority comes from the signed courtroom result and the portal. Never invent a value, and never post a fee, balance, condition, identifier, or contact that a signed order, portal record, or current schedule/policy does not directly support.

Workflow

1. Read answer_template.json first — it is the contract. Note the exact required_top_level_keys, per-array ordering rules, every enum and its allowed values, required keys per item, and the currency/date/datetime/time formats. Build your output to this shape; do not add or drop keys.
2. Read prompt.txt and every file in payloads/. Extract: jurisdiction/court, the target matter IDs, the deliverable sections, and any explicit clerk rules ("do not add …", "do not invent …", "use the exact placeholder …", "hold until signed").
3. Resolve portal access from environment_access.md (base URL + allowed endpoints). GET only, no credentials. See references/portal-api.md.
4. For each target matter, pull the authoritative record(s) from the portal (cases, charges, docket-entries, citations, financial-petitions) plus the current fee-schedule, payment-policy, and form metadata for that jurisdiction.
5. Resolve every field with the source-of-truth ladder (below / references/reconciliation-and-fees.md), recording audit conflicts where the template asks for them.
6. Do the financial math — fee reconciliation and any installment schedule — using current schedule/policy figures (references/financial-math.md).
7. Gate, placeholder, and exclude: hold unsigned/continued matters, insert the exact placeholder for genuinely missing required fields, and route every unsupported item to the template's exclusion list with a reason code.
8. Assemble, sort, format, total, and validate against the contract (references/output-contract.md), then return.

Source-of-truth ladder (which source wins per field)

• Identity (name spelling, DOB): portal/CMS record is authoritative; a corroborating memo (e.g., a defense cover memo) can confirm it over the queue. Never borrow a DOB or name from a similarly named party in search results. If a required identifier is genuinely absent everywhere, use the exact placeholder — do not guess.
• Counsel type / fee eligibility: an on-record clarification (judge statement, hearing notes, defense memo) and the portal's counsel_type beat calendar/queue abbreviations, which are frequently mislabeled. appointed_private and retained counsel are not public-defender-user-fee eligible; only a true public defender is.
• Disposition / plea / sentence / departure: the signed courtroom result (bench record, hearing notes, signed order) beats any draft/legacy/worksheet value. Honor the judge's explicit on-record statements (e.g., "top of range, no departure finding").
• Charges convicted: use the actual conviction count (e.g., an amended charge), not the originally filed or draft count. A fee tied to a specific conviction (lab / drug assessment, etc.) applies only if the defendant was convicted of that offense.
• Fee amounts: the fee-schedule row effective on the disposition date (effective_date ≤ disposition_date and end_date null or ≥ disposition date). Never use an archived/stale prior-year amount.
• Payment-policy terms: the portal payment-policies row for the jurisdiction (min/max monthly band, first-due offset, account fee, restitution priority, return-to-court offset).
• Form metadata & labels: the current portal form; reproduce visible field labels exactly as the local form excerpt shows them.

Non-negotiable rules

• Do not invent identifiers, contacts, fees, balances, conditions, or dates.
• Do not post unsupported fees. Account-management/maintenance, collection, late-payment, DMV/reinstatement, returned-check, traffic-school, copy/certification, court-appointed-attorney, court-reporter fees, restitution not ordered, obsolete footer/service charges, statutory-maximum substitutions, and stale prior-year amounts are excluded unless a signed order / current schedule / current policy supports them. Route each to the template's exclusion list with the matching reason-code enum.
• Gate on the signed order. Only enter a disposition and post financials when the matter is actually disposed with a signed final order. Draft / continued / deferred / unsigned → hold or exclude, no financial register entry, financial_posting_allowed = false, and supply a next-status-check date if the template asks for one.
• Placeholders are verbatim. Use the exact placeholder string the materials specify (commonly TBD from case file), only for genuinely missing required fields, and list them with reason codes.
• Enums are verbatim. Never put prose in an enum field. If a value is genuinely unverifiable and the enum offers a verify_before_entry (or similar) option, use it rather than guessing.
• Conditional sections only when ordered. Prepare a form/section (e.g., a probation referral) only if the underlying order exists; otherwise mark it not-ordered/not- required and set the corresponding status boolean accordingly.
• Totals cover posted matters only. Held/excluded/pending matters are counted in their own count fields, not in the financial totals.

References (read as needed)

• references/portal-api.md — endpoints, query conventions, response shape, and how to select the effective fee-schedule / payment-policy / form rows.
• references/reconciliation-and-fees.md — the conflict-resolution ladder in depth, the unsupported-fee catalog, counsel/fee-eligibility logic, and status gating.
• references/financial-math.md — fee reconciliation, installment-schedule math, budget/support classification, license-suspension dating, return-to-court settings.
• references/output-contract.md — a step-by-step checklist for conforming to answer_template.json (keys, enums, formats, ordering, totals, JSON-only output).