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KIRKSVILLE, MO. -- The Adair County sheriff has a bone to pick with an entity called the MoSMART Board.

That board recently denied the Adair County Sheriff's Office state grant funding to be used to increase deputies' salaries.

Sheriff Bob Hardwick takes issue with the application process and the way the money was distributed.

The money comes from the so-called Deputy Sheriff Salary Supplementation Fund, which was created by a law passed back in 2008.

Hardwick claims the MoSMART Board, which is in charge of distributing the funds, allowed the process to be turned into a "competitive" grant award system, which the board chair denies.

Some other counties besides Adair were also denied funding because of errors on their applications.

"I think the first go-around, it should have been stopped, some corrections made and this money got out to deputies (who) are deserving of this, these funds, throughout the state of Missouri because, again now, some of them were denied or disqualified because of the application process because it was so tedious and cumbersome that now they still don't have any funding because they were denied," said Hardwick.

Hardwick contends there were two or three different versions of the applications that requested contradictory information.

He also told KTVO some sheriff's offices were allowed to correct mistakes, and his office was not.

The form that the Adair County Sheriff's Office receiving stating that funding had been denied stated, "The application was deficient of important information requested by the solicitation. The review panel was unable to determine what the current annual salary per position is to determine the amount of supplemental funding that is owed."

Again, Hardwick showed us how one version of the application form requested one set of information related to deputies' current salaries, and then they later discovered that an online version of the form requested a different set of information about the salaries.

Hardwick makes the case that no county should have been denied funding because sheriff's offices in all of Missouri's counties contributed money to the “Deputy Sheriff Salary Supplementation Fund.

The monies in this fund are raised by means of an additional $10 surcharge that is applied to all civil process filed within the state.

It was the hope of its many supporters that these funds would, at a minimum, raise the base salaries of all deputies in the state to $28,000 a year.

The Adair County Sheriff’s Office has 12 full-time deputies. Half of them make less than $28,000 annually.

More rounds of funding will be distributed from the Salary Supplementation Fund.

Hardwick said it’s his understanding that those in charge are working on simplifying the application to make it easier for sheriff’s offices across the state to apply.