Employees at root of problem no longer work for town 

 At a meeting of the Select Board on Aug. 10, Chair Glenda Hazard gave a finance update of “things that I have found since we have discussed all this.” 

The town’s Chief Financial Officer Linda Catanzariti will attend a board meeting in September to give a more complete update. 

The issues in question arose after accounting discrepancies were discovered earlier this year. In June, Special Town Meeting made several transfers to cover the “human error.” 

At the August meeting, of her update, Hazard said, “It’s kind of a good news/bad news situation.” She explained that the state-related grants – Chapter 90 ($11,000 for road paving) and MassWorks (an anticipated $194,000 for the Route 16 project) – will not be reimbursed because, if a town does not submit for reimbursement, the state assumes the funds are not needed and the money reverts back to the general fund to benefit other municipalities. 

She said one of the other smaller transfers ($6,500) the schools had received for Project Lead The Way would be reimbursed shortly. The town only needed to cover the shortfall during a change in the PLTW reimbursement schedule.  

 Hazard continued, “As far as ongoing assessments, the CFO is meeting with Tighe Bond and a couple of the people related to the park project to talk about any outstanding bills and to come to a final number of what will be left at the end for us to use elsewhere.”

Regarding police details, “That is still an ongoing process, partly because every time the CFO delves into that, it leads to the uncovering of other things that need to be corrected, so that’s an ongoing process,” Hazard said. 

She further explained that the police department uses one program, Detail Tracking System (“DTS”). for police details and “Town Hall uses a different system, or used to, that was provided by a vendor who suddenly died and our access was cut off to all of those records; and instead of reconciling that in an appropriate way, it went unreconciled for a year or a year-and-half. In spring, we recouped about $50,000 immediately but, after that, the records just don’t exist. Honestly, the person in Town Hall was doing their own thing and left no records that indicate a trail of who was billed and who wasn’t.” 

Hazard said the town is now “completely in sync with the DTS system so that will be the system going forward.” 

The town will now go back through the DTS system to re-bill for past detail work. 

Hazard explained, “We’re going to bill all of the people - it’s 192 companies, 192 details - that we aren’t sure whether they paid or not.” The town will ask for payment or proof of payment “instead of trying to go back and figure out what a couple of those Town Hall employees did, the faster method is to go ahead and bill it and then see what the companies can provide us for documentation which will help us in many ways…I’m of the opinion that their accounting process is going to be pretty explicit and they’re going to know that either they sent us a check, and they can verify that they did, or they didn’t.” 

Resident Len Guertin asked the board if those employees “are still doing their own thing?”

Hazard said, “No, they don’t work here anymore.”

To watch the full meeting, visit https://townhallstreams.com