Massachusetts sheriffs failed to report to the state tens of millions of dollars in transactions made through private accounts that were not subject to oversight — one of the numerous factors that prompted a watchdog to warn that the county law enforcement officers’ budgeting is rife with “chaos.”

In a 190-page report released Monday, Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro called the transactions from sources such as inmate commissary accounts his “biggest concern going forward” but said it’s “unclear” whether the practice is against Massachusetts law. He also found that sheriffs often overspend their budget allocations and move around payroll funding to cover other needs, masking the size of their deficits in the process.

The report puts an emphatic punctuation mark on an issue that has roiled the halls of power for nearly a year, as lawmakers grew frustrated by sheriffs asking for considerable funding injections and sought an independent probe of what they deemed questionable practices. But it also faults the executive branch and Legislature for lapses in oversight and expectation-setting that contributed to the upheaval.

Sheriffs, lawmakers, and the Executive Office for Administration and Finance lack a shared understanding on what the office of sheriff should even entail, let alone how the state should fund mandated programs like cost-free communications for incarcerated people, or how sheriffs should handle some fees they collect. “To put it in sheriffs’ terms,” he said in a statement alongside the report. “it’s a bit like the wild west.”

Sheriffs collect money through various aspects of their work, including charges collected from non-criminal services they provide known as “civil process,” paid details, and inmate commissary accounts. And some sheriffs’ offices have different accounting procedures, in some cases improperly mixing these revenues with other funding sources.

It’s not uncommon for state agencies to collect revenue from some other means than taxes, the inspector general’s office wrote, but instead of remitting the money to the state and then spending only what Beacon Hill appropriates, sheriffs steered it through separate accounts.

Altogether, investigators found that sheriffs used more than 120 private bank accounts, from which they spent more than $42 million in fiscal year 2025 and had another $36 million remaining at the budget year’s end.

“The Commonwealth’s banking and accounting systems are designed with built-in checks and balances to enforce certain internal controls,” Shapiro wrote. “In addition, they provide transparency into revenue and expense data, which itself is a control. Activity outside of the state accounting system presents, at a minimum, an internal control weakness that needs to be mitigated.”