The state spent US$13,000 from the its emergency fund to destroy the computer hard drives and server hard drives, Bailey said. Huckabee spokeswoman Alice Stewart said the former governor wanted to delete information that wasn't needed by the new governor, Mike Beebe.

"Gov. Huckabee really wanted to go out of his way to ease the transition of the new governor, and part of that included us shutting down our own computer systems in enough time to remove the hard drives and get them destroyed and return the computers to Beebe's office for them to just install the hard drives rather than get new computers," she said.

Stewart denied that Huckabee destroyed the hard drives to expunge information that might reflect badly on him. And Huckabee himself said he was only trying to protect the privacy of data on the drives.

"This is not about destroying state property, this is about honoring our obligation to protect the privacy of the thousands of people who had personal data on those hard drives," Huckabee said in a statement e-mailed to Computerworld. "We carried out recommendations from the Department of Information Systems to destroy the hard drives. Anyone who is familiar with the ethics commission is aware that Jim Parsons is well known for filing numerous and frivolous complaints against various entities in state government."

Parsons said he tried to file the criminal complaint against Huckabee because of concerns that the governor had destroyed state property. "I think anything over $100 is a felony, and I think this is a felony," Parsons said. "I think to destroy property which is ours -- and to spend [$13,000] to destroy it -- is certainly a waste of taxpayers' money. To destroy our records is just wrong."