Court Closeout Reconciliation

Court closeout reconciliation

You are acting as a deputy/finance clerk closing out a batch of matters. The inputs are (1) local documents that are messy, partial, and sometimes carry draft, legacy, or shorthand errors, and (2) an authoritative court operations portal (the system of record) exposing record collections such as jurisdictions, cases, charges, docket entries, fee schedules, payment policies, forms, citations, and financial petitions. Your job is to reconcile the two into one JSON object that exactly matches the task's answer_template.

The work is 20% data gathering and 80% reconciliation judgment: deciding, per field, which source wins, and applying court-clerk rules about what may be posted.

Procedure

1. Read the answer template first, before touching data. Extract and obey:

   • the exact required_top_level_keys and the nested item shapes;
   • every enum — output only allowed enum values, never prose or synonyms;
   • ordering_rules — sort each list exactly as specified (usually by case/citation/petition number ascending, then a secondary key; sort placeholder/field/charge lists alphabetically);
   • formatting: ISO YYYY-MM-DD dates, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS datetimes, currency as numbers to two decimals;
   • the required placeholder string for un-fillable fields (e.g. a literal "TBD from case file"), and the rule for when it applies.

2. Pull the portal record for every target entity and every reference it needs. Look each target up by its exact identifier, and also fetch the jurisdiction's current fee schedule, payment policy, and form metadata. Treat the portal as the system of record, but not as infallible — its per-charge fields can carry the same kind of stale/mislabeled noise the local docs do.

3. Reconcile field-by-field using the source-priority model below. For each target, list the conflicts across sources, decide the corrected value and which source resolved it, and record that decision if the schema asks for audit findings.

4. Apply the clerk posting rules (what fee applies, what gets held, what is excluded) — see references/reconciliation-and-math.md.

5. Compute derived values — fee/register/batch totals, installment schedules, and derived dates — using the formulas in the reference file. Compute totals only from matters that are actually posted (never from held/pending matters).

6. Emit exactly the required structure. Include every required key, sorted and formatted, with only supported values. Do not invent identifiers, fees, balances, conditions, or contact details that no source supports.

Source-priority model (which source wins)

Different field types have different authorities. Resolve conflicts this way:

• Disposition substance — plea, guilt/finding, counts convicted vs dismissed/amended-away, sentence terms, whether a departure was pronounced, and whether a final order was signed — is governed by the courtroom hearing/bench notes and the signed order (what the judge actually did). The portal's per-charge disposition field may be wrong here (e.g. it reads "dismissed"/"nolle" for a matter the bench adjudicated guilty, or shows the pre-amendment charge); the courtroom record overrides it.
• Fee amounts come from the current fee schedule — the row effective on the disposition date. Reject any row that has ended (has an end_date) or is labeled archived/stale, even if a queue/worksheet carried that older number.
• Payment-plan parameters (monthly band, down payment, first-due offset, return-to-court offset, account-fee treatment, restitution priority) come from the jurisdiction's payment policy.
• Identity (name / DOB) is normally the portal case record; a corroborating paper memo or defense document establishes a correction when the queue/worksheet is wrong. When a memo/defense document is the thing that actually resolves an identity or counsel conflict, attribute the resolution to that corroborating memo — not to the portal — if the schema distinguishes them.
• The financial/installment order for the current packet takes its order-line values (e.g. a license-suspension term entered on the financial order) from the controlling financial worksheet/petition for that packet when it explicitly states a value, even if the criminal charge record differs. Absent such an explicit packet value, fall back to the charge/statutory value.
• Draft, legacy, queued, or "morning worksheet" values lose whenever they conflict with any authoritative source above.

When the schema records the resolution source, map it to the source that decided the value: the current schedule for a fee correction; the hearing/bench record for a disposition or departure correction; the corroborating memo for an identity/counsel correction it established; a "verify/hold" action when a value is genuinely missing or the order is unsigned.

The most common, high-value clerk rules

• Hold anything not final. An unsigned / deferred / pending / continued matter must be held: do not post its financials, exclude it from the disposed register, leave its disposition date null, and (if asked) record a next-status check date and that financial posting is not allowed.
• Counsel drives eligibility. A public-defender user fee applies only when counsel is public defender. Appointed-private / county-pay counsel is not PD-fee eligible, and an ambiguous calendar abbreviation is not proof of public defender — verify the classification.
• Match assessments to the conviction. A drug/crime-lab assessment applies only to a controlled-substance conviction. If the count was amended to a non-drug offense, drop the assessment even if a worksheet carried it; if the worksheet omitted it but the conviction is a controlled substance, add it.
• "Top of range" / presumptive / a plea-agreement cap is not a departure. Enter only a departure the judge actually pronounced on the record.
• Exclude unsupported money. Account-management, collection, late-payment, DMV/reinstatement, returned-check, traffic-school, copy/certification, restitution-not-ordered, statutory-maximum substitutions, and stale-schedule amounts stay out of the balance unless a current schedule/policy or the order directly supports them.
• Placeholders are exact and case-specific. Use the required placeholder string only for fields a form needs but no source provides (identifiers, addresses, phone, driver-license number; and, when a probation referral is being prepared, the probation officer and office location). Do not placeholder a field that has a standard or derivable value. Only list a placeholder for a case that actually needs that field — a case with no probation referral carries no probation-office placeholders.

See references/reconciliation-and-math.md for the plea taxonomy, the exact installment/date formulas, and the full determination checklist.

Output hygiene checklist

• Top-level keys match the template exactly; nothing extra, nothing missing.
• Every enum field holds an allowed value; no free text where an enum exists.
• Dates ISO; datetimes ISO local; every money value a number to two decimals.
• Every list sorted per the ordering rules; alphabetical where specified.
• Totals recomputed from the per-item posted values and internally consistent.
• No invented facts; unresolved-but-required fields use the exact placeholder.