Checks in former worker's desk totaled more than $1.13 million.
By Tom Murse
Published Aug 25, 2006 13:53
The number of checks is far more than officials thought when they intitiated an investigation earlier this week.
The stunning discovery includes 374 unprocessed applications for the Clean and Green land preservation program dating back to 2003, as well as $460.75 in cash.
Meantime, top county officials were hard-pressed to explain why no one in the courthouse, and particularly the tax assessment office, noticed the former employee apparently wasn’t doing his job over the past three years.
“That’s a very good question,” said Commissioner Dick Shellenberger. “We’re taking this very seriously. This is something we’re very concerned about, and we will take measures to correct it.”
The director of the assessment office, Phil Rainey, wrote in an e-mail to the New Era that he was not permitted to comment this morning.
The former Clean and Green administrator, Lancaster City resident Dave Straub, had given two weeks’ notice of his resignation before officials uncovered the uncashed checks. His last day was Aug. 16. Officials confronted him a day earlier and have not been able to contact him since.
An investigator from the district attorney’s office and an accountant from the controller’s office began probing the matter Tuesday and intially thought only a couple dozen checks were involved.
Officials have cautioned there is no evidence of any misuse of tax funds or other criminal activity.
The checks were taken to a vault in the treasurer’s office in the courthouse Thursday afternoon, after a meeting of department heads and authorities probing the matter.
“They won’t be deposited until staff from the controller’s office can determine whether there are any duplicate checks in there because somebody thought their assessment check was lost,” said treasurer Craig Ebersole.
“They’re not going to be deposited until every check can be matched up to an application to Clean and Green or to rollback taxes,” Ebersole said.
Pennsylvania’s Clean and Green program provides tax breaks to property owners who agree to not develop their land. To qualify, the land must be farmland, open space or forest, and at least 10 acres in size.
However, when properties enrolled in the program are developed or altered in such a way that doesn’t comply with Clean and Green, the owner must repay those tax breaks, along with 6 percent interest.
The largest checks, for tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, were those so-called “rollback” payments. Officials found 54 of them, uncashed, in the desk.
Straub was supposed to have recorded the rollbacks and to have sent the checks to the treasurer’s office, where the tax money would have been disbursed to the county, school districts, townships and boroughs. The interest goes to the county Agricultural Preservation Board.
Those checks totaled $1,113,444.02, Ebersole said.
The smaller checks, for $18.50 and $26.50, were from property owners applying to the Clean and Green program. Officials found more than 750 of those checks, for filing and recording fees, in the desk.
Those checks totaled $16,830.
Straub was not authorized to cash the checks.
The $460.75 in cash that officials found apparently came from property owners who walked their Clean and Green applications and filing fees into the office.
The program administrator was supposed to record each application, transfer it to the recorder of deeds office, and send the checks to the treasurer’s office. Neither happened in most cases; officials think some of the applications may have been forwarded, however.
“We have more money than we can account for in applications,” said controller Dennis Stuckey.
Straub could not be reached for comment this week because he has an unpublished telephone number and did not respond to an e-mail inquiry.
It remains unclear why he did not record the checks, and officials could offer no explanations.
“How this occurred, how he continued to get an annual performance review that permitted him to remain in employment — those are all questions that will need to be answered by the director of assessment,” Ebersole said.
As the New Era reported earlier this week, an assessment official confronted Straub about a “performance issue” in late July, and days later Straub informed them he was quitting on Aug. 16.
The issue, Rainey said earlier this week, was Straub’s excessive use of a workplace computer — to check baseball scores, for instance. Another source has said Straub’s frequent posts on Internet forums were the problem.
Straub posted numerous comments — more than 3,000 since 2001 — on an Internet forum called TalkBack, operated by Lancaster Newspapers Inc. He signed his name to some of the posts.
In one of them, from April 2003, Straub invited people interested in knowing more about the Clean and Green program to send an e-mail to his personal address.
“I check up on these boards — and that email account — occasionally while I am at work, but at least half of the posting that I do — including right now — is done from home,” he wrote.
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