State audit finds misuse of funds in Town of Fishkill Rec Department

http://midhudsonnews.com/News/2014/February/21/FishkillRecAudit-21Feb14.htm For more free local news check out the papers website.

Editors Note: I have been calling for a Forensic Audit for years. The Supervisor said it was not needed. Last year sewer district tennants were hit with a 135% tax increase when paperwork came back bad. Now we have this.

A Forensic Audit is needed, we cannot trust the Supervisor who has failed to protect the taxpayers of the Town of Fishkill.

ALBANY – The former recreation director in the Town of Fishkill allegedly misused as much as $50,000 generated by the town’s senior center, according to an audit by the State Comptroller’s Office. The findings have been turned over to Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady.

The state audit found that the former director did not issue receipts for cash collected at the senior center and did not remit money to the town comptroller or provide reports to the town supervisor. Based on senior center revenue collections made after the woman retired following some 20 years of service to Fishkill, auditors projected that center funds totaling as much as $26,000 in 2011 and $19,000 in 2012 may have been gone.

Town officials first discovered the discrepancies, Town Supervisor Robert LaColla said Friday.

? “It was almost as if she was running a separate business within the recreation department,” he said. “There were a lot of irregular practices that we had been trying to counsel her about and then when we found the bank account we knew we had some serious issues there so we turned it over to the state.”

The former director opened an unauthorized bank account which allowed her to deposit senior center funds and make undetected and inappropriate withdraws, the state audit said. Officials said she routinely paid for overnight trips for center members with her personal credit card and then wrote checks from the unauthorized account to herself and her husband for $3,500 more than the actual cost and she and her husband did not pay $4,600 in personal fees for the trips.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli recommended that the town improve financial oversight.