Updated June 27 at 10:51 a.m. with the auditor’s letter
Former Orange County Sheriff Bill Bohnyak left his office’s finances in disarray: That’s the top-line message of a just-released financial assessment of his administration.
So messy are the books, according to the firm tasked with completing a mandatory audit of the department, that auditors were unable to complete their investigation of the last seven months of Bohynak’s administration.
In a June 21 letter obtained by VTDigger and now available on the state auditor’s website, Tom Stretton, a partner at the auditing firm McSoley McCoy & Co., which handles all sheriff transition audits in Vermont, described the irregularities in the department’s accounts under Bohnyak.
Stretton wrote to George Contois, who became sheriff in February after unseating Bohnyak in the November election, that the firm would “cease our services as your independent auditors” because the department’s “financial records are not audit ready” and the bookkeeping had not been done properly and consistently during the time period under review — July 1, 2022, through Jan. 31, 2023.
Contois said that, when he took over the department, he had no idea what he was inheriting.
“I didn’t want to buy a pig in a poke, but I did.”
Bohnyak, who was sheriff for 16 years, did not return an email and voicemail asking to discuss the audit’s findings.
When a new sheriff takes over a department, state law requires a financial audit of the previous department.
Among the auditors’ findings were that the Orange County department had a nearly $100,000 line of credit toward which it had stopped making payments. On Contois’s first day in office, the bank took the full balance of the credit directly from the department’s account.
The department also took out an uncollateralized $225,000 loan in November 2019 to make building upgrades. Instead, the loan appears to have been used to purchase and outfit vehicles, pay bonuses, and cover office expenses, among other uses, according to Stretton.
The department’s records also misrepresented the remaining balance — $186,878 — by almost $10,000, thus showing the office owed less than it really did.
On the department’s balance sheet, the auditors discovered $19,000 in advances for employees who have since left the department. “No agreements exist for these advances,” Stretton wrote, meaning employees had been given money without any plan to pay it back.
Former employees reaped further rewards, the audit found. “Several individuals who had long been retired from the Department were still on the (department’s Verizon) account and able to charge the account for new phones and have their phone bill paid by the Department,” Stretton wrote.
Both accounts payable and receivable were “materially misrepresented,” according to Stretton. One example he provided: The department’s books indicate it owed itself almost $90,000.
Stretton also discovered that, in the weeks before Bohnyak left office, his department had repair work and upfitting done on a number of police vehicles, but didn’t pay for the improvements. Those vehicles were then sold on Bohnyak’s last day in office.
In his parting words of wisdom, Stretton suggested Contois “continue (the) effort to gain access to all bank and debt accounts at various institutions.”
Contois seemed unsurprised by the disarray discovered by the auditors, having experienced the messy books himself since he took office.
“It’s pretty much the same way it’s been going,” he said, referring to bookkeeping problems discovered in past audits. According to Contois, when the last administration was asked to make changes in its record system after earlier audits uncovered problems, “(Bohnyak) did nothing.”
Upon taking office, Contois found “dozens and dozens and dozens — I’m not exaggerating — of invoices that were never sent out.”
Explaining the investigation’s incomplete findings, Doug Hoffer, Vermont’s state auditor, said an audit requires certain bookkeeping standards to be completed.
“You cannot do an audit if you’re not persuaded that the information in front of you is accurate and reliable,” he said, and an audit also must cease if “criminal irregularities” are discovered.
In the case of the Orange County department, Hoffer said, the audit’s findings don’t “appear to be criminal,” as they don’t show that the former sheriff enriched himself.
“If he misused resources,” Hoffer said, “I’m not sure how that gets to be criminal.”
Without a criminal component, it would be challenging to hold the previous department accountable, he suggested: “I really don’t know what can be done and by whom.”
According to Hoffer, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has a history of bookkeeping troubles. Audits in the past have been delayed due to improperly kept records, he said, and former audits have contained caveats due to unresolved questions within the books.
With that in mind, all of the credit given to the department appeared strange. “I’m a little puzzled why a bank, if it had any history with this department, would think it prudent to give an uncollateralized loan to the sheriff of Orange County,” Hoffer said.
Although the transition audit — or lack thereof — covered only the previous sheriff’s administration, Hoffer argued the current sheriff bears some responsibility for the predicament he’s found himself in.
“Let’s be fair, you gotta put some of this on Contois,” he said, contending Contois had a responsibility to educate himself about all aspects of the office he was elected to.
Contois, for his part, suggested he leads a department on the up-and-up.
“(Bohnyak’s) attempt to dismantle his department I think has failed,” he said. “Our assets are better. We’ve got a good cash flow. We’re hiring people. We’re doing just fine.”
