Ex-officials asked state for audit in 2004
The Daily Mail
June 15, 2009, online

Former Cairo Supervisor Joseph Calcavecchia and former Deputy Supervisor Gerard Aprea said the Comptroller’s Office was called for a formal audit in 2004, three years before an audit of 2007 was conducted, but the state did not respond.

“We begged the Comptroller to come in from day one,” Calcavecchia said.

Aprea said the Comptroller’s Office did not send a representative to audit the town when asked in 2004.

The next year, he said, someone from the state did come to look at financial records but did not conduct a full audit.

The representative told the town that things looked all right and the town had a lot of money in its accounts, Aprea said.

Calcavecchia defended statements in a recently released audit report from the state Comptroller’s Office that indicate contracts and work lacked a paper trail saying that he had trouble obtaining documents from other town officials and staff.

Calcavecchia and Aprea said the first few years of their terms in office were difficult. They said they were faced with a legacy left to them by the previous administration.

“When you have political warfare going on and in house problems, you’re not going to get half the stuff you needed,” Calcavecchia said. “There was a lot of bad blood going on at the time.”

Calcavecchia said conflicts between Brian Fitzgerald, an accountant he had hired shortly after taking office, and the town clerk made obtaining certain files difficult.

Town Clerk Tara Rumph said she had approached the town board prior to 2007 regarding accounting and bookkeeping issues.

Board members said they believed the accountant complied with guidelines and state law.

The accountant presented monthly reports to the town board, Councilman Richard Lorenz said.

Councilman Raymond Suttmeier said he trusted the accountant and his work.

Aprea requested an auditor to visit Cairo a second time, in 2007, to investigate town clerk records regarding a grant writer.

The town board had other concerns with town clerk reports that led to a lawsuit; of which the town clerk was later cleared of all allegations.

Calcavecchia and Aprea said that the audit was politically motivated because the auditor did not see the town clerk’s records as they had hoped.

Other members of the town board said the auditor had been directed not to enter the Town Clerk’s Office, saying they assumed that the auditor’s superiors had made the call.

Aprea said Calcavecchia ran the town “like a business” and worked hard to obtain and maintain funds needed to fix the town’s sewer system.

He said that when he and Calcavecchia left town government, the town had a $1.5 million surplus and a developer had been interested in working to revitalize more of Main Street beyond the scope of the proposed Views at Alden Terrace development.

He said the problem with the 2007 audit lies with the state’s earlier inaction.

“They did not come in and do an audit of the town and they need to do an audit of the town,” he said. “They never did what we asked them to do.”

According to the report from the 2007 audit, which was released in May, auditors gathered materials through interviews with officials and staff as well as reviews of cash receipts, bank statements and personnel files.

William Reynolds, a spokesman for the Office of the State Comptroller, said in an e-mail that the period of examination spanned 2004 to 2007.

A previous audit, which looked at records from 2000 and 2001, was conducted in 2002, he said.

According to its report, the earlier audit showed no indication of balance or fund deficiencies, no evidence that policies and procedures to ensure capital projects were properly authorized were inappropriate and no indication that the town clerk did not maintain adequate records and reports to ensure money was properly recorded, deposited, disbursed and reported.

Shelly Brown, records access officer with the Office of the State Comptroller, said in a Freedom of Information Law response letter that records from the Town Clerk’s Office had been included in the 2007 audit process and audit personnel had entered the Town Clerk’s Office.

The letter stated that the audit was conducted by a team including Ken Madej, Theresa Bonneau and Joseph Noto and that no member from the team was asked not to enter the Town Clerk’s Office during the audit process.

Brown’s letter also stated that the town clerk’s records had not been subject to their own audit between 2006 and 2009.

“The Town Clerk’s records were not audited, but they were assessed. There was no report issued as a result of that assessment,” the letter states.

Calcavecchia noted that he was absent from meetings with the Comptroller’s Office and from the town government at the end of 2007 for personal reasons.

Calcavecchia said he had not seen a copy of the 2007 audit report.

“I don’t have to read it, it was done by my enemies,” he said.