It is hard to figure what is worse – that the Town of North Hempstead was without a comptroller for more than a year or the town’s response to a town employee allegedly stealing more $98,000 in cash during that time.
Town spokesperson Carole Trottere said in a statement last week that “if a dishonest employee is intent on stealing cash, they are going to do it. But the question is, ‘Did we have the controls in place to catch them?’ and we did and reported it immediately to the DA.”
We congratulate the town for informing the District Attorney that it discovered an employee had allegedly embezzled more than $98,000 in cash between May 11, 2014 and Jan. 22. Better that than detention.
But we can’t be as pleased with the rest of her response.
A full-time comptroller is responsible for the town’s procedures and internal controls, and making sure internal controls are followed.
To suggest that not having a comptroller in place from September 2014 to August 2015 is not a problem is, to be generous, troubling.
Is Trottere saying that the state of New York would suffer no harm if state Comptroller Tom Napoli and Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos stepped down and no one took their place? In fact, both comptroller positions are elective — better to keep them independent.
Or as Bruce Horner, executive of the New York Public Interest Group, told Newsday: “The whole point of having financial oversight entities is to protect taxpayer dollars and to make people think twice about stealing.”
In point of fact, employees of the comptroller’s office uncovered the alleged embezzlement by secretary Helen McCann in mid-January — four months after the town hired Averil Smith as comptroller.
And the fact that a dishonest person might steal doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have or don’t need police – or comptrollers. It is, in fact, one of the reasons we have police and comptrollers.
The alleged theft by McCann raises other questions.
As Town Councilwoman Dina De Giorgio told Newsday, “What else happened during those 18 months that we didn’t see?”
Trottere, who it should be noted was speaking on behalf of Town Supervisor Judi Bosworth, was right when she pointed out that employees inclined to steal cash could do so.
Prosecutors said McCann would deposit less cash than employees collected in waste drop-off fees on Sundays.
This was made possible, in part, by a cash-only requirement at the drop-off site.
The question is why. Why no credit cards? Why not a credit-card-only policy?
And how do we know that all the money collected by employees made it to McCann?
Sounds like the job for a comptroller — or a prosecutor.
But McCann’s arrest raises a bigger question, coming in the wake of the revelations about former Town of North Hempstead Democratic Committee Chairman Gerard Terry.
Terry until recently was the attorney for the town’s Board of Zoning Appeals and special counsel for the town attorney during a period in which he owed more than $1.4 million in federal and state back taxes, had been party to five lawsuits and let his attorney registration lapse for three years.
A week ago Blank Slate Media reporter Noah Manskar reported that the town had failed to enforce a 25-year-old town law that requires financial disclosure statements from town political party leaders like Terry.
And that Concetta Terry, Terry’s wife and a deputy town clerk, had omitted her husband’s tax debts from her financial disclosure records since 2006, omissions that are now subject to a North Hempstead ethics board investigation.
All of which raises the question of just who’s minding the store?
