Audit Objective
Did the Town of Willsboro (Town) Town Clerk/Tax Collector (Clerk) properly record, deposit, report and remit collections?
Audit Period
January 1, 2017 – November 30, 2021.
The release of this report was suspended while outside law enforcement reviewed the matter.
Understanding the Audit Area
The Clerk collects fees for a variety of purposes including licenses, water and sewer charges and transfer station tickets. Other fees are collected by Town employees and remitted to the Clerk for deposit, including fees for building permits, youth programs and golf course charges. The Clerk is responsible for remitting these collections to the Town Supervisor (Supervisor) and New York State (NYS) agencies. During the audit period, clerk fee collections received totaled more than $2.4 million.
The Clerk also collects Town and Essex County (County) real property taxes from January 1st to April 30th each year and is responsible for remitting the collections to the Supervisor and County Treasurer. During the audit period, tax collections received totaled more than $12.8 million.
Audit Summary
The Clerk did not properly record, deposit, report and remit collections and misappropriated more than $29,000 in collections during the audit period. The Clerk concealed her misappropriation of collections by not recording collections or recording them for less than the amount received, making unsupported cash deposits, not reporting and remitting collections to the Supervisor and NYS agencies, not returning overpayments to taxpayers and making unsupported disbursements between her three bank accounts.
The Clerk worked for the Town from 2014 to 2021, having lost election in 2021. She also separately served as Treasurer for the Essex County Agricultural Society (Society), a non-profit organization that promotes agriculture through the Essex County Fair, from 2013 to 2019.
Based upon the audit findings and subsequent investigation of the Clerk’s activities at both the Town and the Society, the Clerk was arrested in the summer of 2024 for stealing approximately $60,000 from the Society and $29,000 from the Town.
In May 2025, the Clerk pleaded guilty to felony grand larceny in the second degree for the funds stolen from the Society and felony grand larceny in the third degree as a crime of public corruption for the theft from the Town.
In July 2025, the Clerk was sentenced to five years’ probation and ordered to pay full restitution of nearly $90,000 for stealing funds from both the Society and Town.
We reviewed the Clerk’s records during the audit period and identified significant deficiencies. The deficiencies included, but were not limited to, the following:
- Collections totaling $43,448 could not be traced to a deposit and unsupported cash deposits totaling $14,232 were made into the Clerk’s three bank accounts. While we could not determine the source of the unsupported cash deposits, when subtracted from the collections that could not be traced to a deposit, this resulted in a combined cash shortage of $29,216 during the audit period.
- Collections were not properly recorded. For example, receipts were not recorded in the clerk software program for collections totaling $11,814.
- Collections were not deposited within the required timeframes. For example, for 52 of the 100 days we reviewed, the recorded tax collections totaling more than $1.1 million were not deposited within 24 hours of receipt, as required by NYS Town Law (Town Law).
- Based on our review of transfer station tickets, 42 tickets, valued at $745, were unaccounted for. As a result, officials do not have assurance that all collections received for ticket sales were deposited, or that the Clerk or Deputy Clerk did not take tickets for their own personal use without payment.
- Clerk fee collections were not remitted to the Supervisor and NYS agencies in the appropriate amounts and within the required timeframes. For example, for 34 of the 59 months (58 percent) during the audit period, the corresponding remittances made to the Supervisor from the clerk bank account were not for the appropriate amounts. For 31 of the 34 months, the Clerk or Deputy Clerk remitted a total of $14,285 less to the Supervisor than the amount owed.
- The Clerk did not remit tax collections to the Supervisor and County Treasurer in the appropriate amounts and/or within the required timeframes. For example, during the audit period, the Clerk did not remit to the Supervisor $14,167 in interest and penalties collected for tax payments made after the collection due dates.
- The Clerk did not return to taxpayers $2,460 in tax overpayments collected during the audit period.
- The Clerk made unsupported disbursements between her three bank accounts totaling $10,207. For example, the Clerk made an unsupported online transfer totaling $4,412 from the tax collector bank account to the clerk bank account on July 16, 2018. On the same day, $3,360 in cash collections were recorded in the clerk software program but were not deposited into the clerk bank account.
These deficiencies occurred and the Clerk was able to misappropriate collections without detection, because the Town Board (Board) did not provide oversight of the Clerk’s duties, such as conducting independent reviews of the Clerk’s records and bank statements. In addition, the Board did not require the Clerk to prepare monthly bank reconciliations and accountability analyses, which compare cash on hand and in the bank with known liabilities. This contributed to the discrepancies in the Clerk’s records not being detected and corrected and resulted in officials not identifying the cash shortages in the Clerk’s bank accounts during the audit period.
The Board also did not audit, or contract with an independent public accountant to audit, the Clerk’s records for the 2017 through 2020 fiscal years. Had the Board fulfilled its fiscal oversight responsibilities by performing an annual audit of the Clerk’s records, it may have identified certain irregularities that could have led to the detection of the Clerk’s misappropriation of collections.
Our previous audit report released in July 20141 had similar findings related to monthly bank reconciliations and accountability analyses not being prepared and an annual audit of the Clerk’s records not being performed. In addition, our audit follow-up letter released in August 20162 identified that officials had not implemented the recommendations in our previous audit report to address these findings. While the Clerk, Supervisor and four Council members received our previous audit report and audit follow-up letter since they were in office at the time of the releases, the same deficiencies continued to exist during the audit period, because these officials did not implement any corrective action to address the findings.
The report includes 14 recommendations that, if implemented, will improve the Clerk’s financial activities. Town officials generally agreed with our recommendations and indicated they planned to initiate corrective action.
We conducted this audit pursuant to Article V, Section 1 of the State Constitution and the Office of the New York State Comptroller’s (OSC) authority as set forth in Article 3 of the New York State General Municipal Law. Our methodology and standards are included in Appendix C.
The Board has the responsibility to initiate corrective action. A written corrective action plan (CAP) that addresses the findings and recommendations in this report should be prepared and provided to our office within 90 days, pursuant to Section 35 of the New York State General Municipal Law. For more information on preparing and filing your CAP, please refer to our brochure, Responding to an OSC Audit Report, which you received with the draft audit report. We encourage the Board to make the CAP available for public review in the Clerk’s office.
1 Town of Willsboro – Internal Controls Over Selected Financial Operations (2014M-68)