[T]he FBI’s investigation into former Coventry town clerk and treasurer Cynthia Diaz is active.
Two bureau agents interviewed Kate Fletcher, the town’s delinquent tax collector and an assessing clerk, in mid-July, Fletcher told VTDigger.
The agents spoke with her for more than an hour in her office at the Coventry Community Center, Fletcher said. She declined to reveal the details of the discussion but said she came away with the sense that investigators were ramping up their efforts.
“They are very active and very much in pursuit,” she said.
Sarah Ruane, a spokesperson for the FBI’s regional office in Albany, New York, said she could not comment on ongoing investigations.
Diaz, who had also been a delinquent tax collector, has been the subject of at least four investigations involving financial fraud since 2005. Authorities found that she had been writing checks from town accounts to herself and hadn’t deposited cash for property tax payments she received for the town, and in 2015, an auditor concluded that Coventry had been missing about $1.4 million.
Diaz was removed from her position as delinquent tax collector on Town Meeting Day in 2017 and was forced from her other offices that June when she couldn’t secure a required bond for insurance coverage. That May, the town won an insurance claim of nearly $500,000 for its missing money from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, the maximum payable.
Diaz has denied embezzling town money but pleaded guilty in 2011 to misdemeanor counts of tax evasion.
She declined comment when reached by phone on Tuesday.
The ongoing federal investigation into Diaz has periodically surfaced in the public eye since her ouster. VTDigger reported in January 2018 that the U.S. Department of Justice had sent a letter to dozens of Coventry taxpayers in October 2017 asking them to provide the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Burlington with records of their tax payments. A similar letter went out to taxpayers in March, the Caledonian Record reported this spring.
Fletcher’s recent contact with the FBI also came up during the Coventry Selectboard’s meeting on Aug. 5, minutes show.
Selectboard Chair Mike Marcotte said at the meeting that Fletcher had been receiving requests for information from the bureau related to its investigation into “the former Treasurer and Delinquent Tax Collector,” according to the minutes.
Marcotte, calling the work with the FBI “very important” for the town, said that Fletcher should be compensated for her time spent working with agents because it falls outside of her duties as delinquent tax collector, minutes show.
Selectboard members voted unanimously to compensate Fletcher for up to 30 hours by the end of the year, according to the minutes.