Knox audited after missing financial reports

Enterprise file photo — H. Rose Schneider
Knox Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis conducts his second annual tour of town facilities in early 2017. 

KNOX — After not filing annual financial reports for the last two years, the town of Knox will be audited by the state comptroller’s office.

Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis said at a Dec. 11 town board meeting that the town would be undergoing what he described as a random audit. But Mark Johnson, a press officer for the state comptroller’s office, said that the audit is at least in part due to the missing reports.

“A large part of why we are auditing the town was the lack of completing annual reports to our office. Neither 2016 nor 2017 were filed as of October 2018,” Johnson wrote in an email to The Enterprise. He later added that the comptroller’s office still has not received the reports.

Lefkaditis has served as supervisor since 2016, after ousting longtime supervisor Michael Hammond in November 2015.

After the Dec. 11 meeting, Knox resident Brigitte McAuliffe said the audit was due to her contacting the comptroller’s office multiple times over the missing annual reports. McAuliffe has also previously filed public integrity complaints with the New York State Attorney General’s Office against the town board over moving forward in the approval process of a multi-use recreational district.

Johnson said that the length of time an audit lasts varies widely, but said it would likely be a matter of months. The results of the audit would be available to the public once finalized, he said.

Lefkaditis declined to comment. The supervisor, who has declined to comment over the phone or in person to The Enterprise for the past year, said he would provide an emailed response only if it were published in full. The Enterprise offered to publish his response in full as a letter to the editor, which he declined.

Tags:

More Hilltowns News

  • An internal investigation into Westerlo Town Clerk Karla Weaver found she had bullied and intimidated other town employees, falsified documents, and orchestrated a Freedom of Information Law campaign designed to bog down the town supervisor’s office. 

  • Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s $24.7 million budget, with a 3.3 percent tax increase, passed with 70-percent approval from voters, who also re-elected incumbents Matthew Tedeschi and Rebecca Miller to the board of education. 

  • The law will make it easier for residents to build accessory-dwelling units that are up to 1,200 square feet of living space, in what is at least partly an effort to keep senior citizens in the town. 

The Altamont Enterprise is focused on hyper-local, high-quality journalism. We produce free election guides, curate readers' opinion pieces, and engage with important local issues. Subscriptions open full access to our work and make it possible.