VOORHEESVILLE — The beleaguered Voorheesville School District has placed its assistant superintendent for business, Sarita Winchell, on administrative leave while the state comptroller completes his audit.

Comptroller Alan Hevesi claimed to have uncovered corruption, stating the former superintendent and former assistant superintendent made improper payments to themselves, totaling $216,000. They are accused of collecting inappropriate payments in relation to personal leave, sick days, vacation and other benefits.
The district does not want to foster any "allegations of impeding the investigation," school board President Joseph Pofit said at Monday’s board meeting. Winchell was placed on leave to protect both her and the district, Pofit said.
The assistant superintendent of business is a "very critical position" that is accountable for management of the business office, Pofit said.
"Some transactions...the chain of command and the writing of checks can best be reviewed without the manager of the business office being present," Pofit said.

Hevesi estimated last month the Voorheesville audit would take another three months to complete.

Following school-district scandals on Long Island, the state comptroller has reinstated school audits after a 25-year hiatus.

The comptroller’s auditors first became suspicious this summer when then-Superintendent Alan McCartney was asked to stay on and work for two additional weeks beyond his retirement to help with the transition to a new superintendent, and then McCartney immediately collected reimbursement for an additional 35 days of vacation time, as if he had worked for a another full year, Pofit said; the comptroller’s office alerted the board to the payment.

Marturano, the retired assistant superintendent for business, has maintained his and McCartney’s innocence. Marturano insists he was paid only what his contract allowed. McCartney has not been reachable.

The Albany County District Attorney’s Office is investigating the matter; no charges have been filed.

The school district is not aware of any serious wrongdoing by others, Pofit said.
The board does believe in innocent until proven guilty Pofit said, responding to a Feb. 2 Enterprise editorial, "Rush to Judgment," and the board will do everything in its power to recoup all the public funds, he said. The district has filed lawsuits against both McCartney and Marturano.
In the meantime the board of education will not "neglect the mandate that we have," Pofit said. "The focus is on the education of the kids."

Winchell did not return phone calls from The Enterprise this week.

Waiting on edge
It could become very easy to mistake this as a "witch hunt," Portia Hubert, a Voorheesville resident who works for the district, warned the board at its meeting Monday. "It’s bordering on that now," she said. People are waiting to see who or what will be next, she said.
"Sarita she’s a great employee; people are going to start bailing," Bob Burns, another Voorheesville resident, told the board as television news cameras rolled.

This was the first regularly-scheduled school board meeting since the press conference on January 24 where Hevesi accused McCartney and Marturano of wrongdoing and Pofit expressed outrage on behalf of the school board. The board Monday spoke before an auditorium full of residents.

Things seem very secretive now; it seems that there is a great deal the public is not aware of, Hubert said.
Margaret Flanders, another district resident, asked school board member Richard Brackett what he meant when she overheard him saying to a friend directly before the meeting: "We got three, one more to go." After a long pause Brackett, said he did not remember saying this and was confused by what she was talking about.

Veteran school board member James Coffin said that, while Hevesi had been very open with the district at first about his audit findings, now the state’s objective is to finish the audit.
"At this point, we don’t know what he has found," Coffin said. "We might not know all of what he has found." The board has laid out everything that it can, "We want to shed light on this whole thing," Coffin said.

The district still has not released the employment contracts of McCartney or Marturano to The Enterprise, although Robert Freeman, the executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government continues to say that they are a matter of public record.
It’s an unsettling time, Coffin told the crowd. Employees who work in the business office are being bombarded with questions. "We can’t be more open...We don’t know more," Coffin said.
"We are just going to deal with everything that comes up...We are not looking to fix blame," he said. "Our next job is to rebuild the trust," Coffin said.

Pofit said on Tuesday night that since only a handful of residents spoke at Monday’s meeting, he interprets that to mean the community supports the board.
"We are thankful for people’s support at this point," Pofit said.

It can be frustrating at times that the school cannot disclose some information because it is in litigation, Pofit said.
"I think how the board handles all these issues will affect the voting on the budget," Hubert said. Voorheesville has a spotty history of passing school budgets and this year the town of New Scotland has reassessed properties, with massive increases overall.

Hubert said she has full confidence in the board to put together a realistic budget, and advised the board that it is very important to show the community that they are credible.
"How can you point fingers here and there and not at yourself"" Bob Burns asked the board. He asked the board and particularly Pofit if, in retrospect, he would have done anything differently on the day of the press conference.

Coffin said that nobody intentionally said that someone is guilty; the board laid out what the allegations were and moved as quickly as possible.
The board was very upset and had to take action, Pofit said, and with the advice of legal counsel and the comptroller’s staff, it moved quickly. The district filed its lawsuit against McCartney and Marturano the same day as the press conference. If the board hadn’t moved quickly, it would have been criticized and now it is being criticized for moving too fast, Pofit said. "Your damned if you do and your dammed if you don’t," he said.
The board was stunned, Coffin said, and the members have tried their hardest. This is the first time that any of the board members have had to go through anything like this. "The only thing I can assure you...We are doing the best we can," Coffin said.

Burns said since he read in The Enterprise that Marturano adamantly denies the allegations against him, Burns asked the board if Marturano would have legal recourse for slander.

Board member Kevin Kroencke responded that he didn’t know, but, while the comptroller is not a court of law, the state office has said that $216,000 was improperly paid.

Board member David Gibson said that the comptroller came to the board and said that there were some problems and the school board then contracted out its own internal investigation, and came to conclusions which were then also reaffirmed by the comptroller’s findings.

The comptroller has a plan to audit all school districts across the state over the next five years. Voorheesville was randomly chosen to be the first in Albany County, and it is one of seven in the Capital Region.

When Hevesi’s five-point plan was introduced in the fall of 2004, area school business officials were quoted in The Enterprise reacting to the new requirements.

At that time, Voorheesville did not have an auditing committee, board members did not receive financial training, and the district had contracted with the same outside auditing firm for 10 years, Winchell said. She was, at that time, open to reform.
"It’s a good start to uniformly change things in business offices across the state," Winchell said. She said she considered the state audits to be "definitely necessary" because auditing "promotes confidence" from the public.

The thing that safeguards against fraud the most, Winchell said at the time, is good internal controls.
"You guys have to be held accountable," Burns told the school board Monday night. The board had approved some of the payments in compensation for unused sick time, and had incorporated an additional $12,000 into McCartney’s salary for the last three years of employment, to pay for back time, The Enterprise reported earlier. The board now says is was purposely manipulated and deceived by McCartney into believing he was entitled to this money while he actually was not.
"We can’t say we weren’t part of the process," Coffin responded.

Gibson said he would have expected the 10-year auditor to find more, and that the board agrees in hindsight there should have been better separation of duties.

The school district is now implementing the recommendation made by Betty Cure, contracted from the New York State School Boards’ Association Advisory Solutions to review all the functions of the business office.

A Voorheesville resident asked the board Monday if, without the state audit, it would have ever found out, about administrators’ improperly collecting money.
"Probably...eventually," Pofit said.
Toritto said it makes him ask, "Is there too much money in the budget if $216,000 can just disappear into thin air""

Pofit reminded everyone that Hevesi said the money was allocated over a number of years—16 for McCartney and 11 for Marturano—and often in the form of small handwritten checks.

Proper actions"

Considering the board’s previous decisions and public perception, Valerie Glover brought up a controversy from 2004, when Robert Baron, then president of the school board, cast the deciding vote to appoint his wife to a position in the school’s business office. The Enterprise at the time wrote about the ethical questions raised by the vote.

Pofit said this week that the board had the matter reviewed at that time and has also requested in recent months another opinion from another attorney and both times it was determined that this was not illegal. But, Pofit said, the board has now come to the conclusion that Baron would have made a better choice to recuse himself from the vote. This ultimately would have meant a tie in votes and Deborah Baron would not have been hired as the district’s tax collector.

Pofit told The Enterprise on Tuesday that the board had recently acquired a new legal opinion because questions about that action had come up, and along with the auditing process, the board is checking into anything questionable. Pofit said, while it probably would have been best if Baron had recused himself, it was still his personal choice.

Baron did not return a phone call from The Enterprise this week for comment.

Quelling recent rumors, Pofit said Baron was never paid by the school as a consultant during the district’s multi-million dollar expansion project.

Baron was the board’s representative on the building committee, who chose to oversee the building project as a board member; he worked strictly as a volunteer and was not paid, Pofit said.

Baron is an outstanding citizen, Pofit said, who has had unquestionable dedication to the district as he volunteered many hours overseeing the building project, where his extensive expertise was much appreciated.