State finds Nimishillen Township slightly overpaid road workers, lost records
NIMISHILLEN TWP. – Three township road department workers mistakenly overpaid a total of $2,150.
Receipts and records for 2019 went missing. And officials appropriating more money for funds than the legally certified limit.
Those are among several financial errors Nimishillen Township officials made in 2019 and 2020, according to an Ohio Auditor's office report released Friday.
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Local officials are pointing fingers at each other.
Nimishillen Township officials blaming each other
Township Fiscal Officer Todd Bosley, a former Stark County commissioner and former Nimishillen trustee, doesn't deny making some errors. But he also blames his predecessor Brian Kandel as well as the pandemic.
In addition, he cites a decision by the township trustees to exempt road employees from entering their hours on the township's new payroll system and the office of County Auditor Alan Harold, which he said did not provide certified revenue estimates on time.
Bosley said the handwritten time sheets from road department workers are at times confusing and contradictory. But the trustees refused a year ago to require them to submit their hours in an electronic format. Bosley emailed a time sheet from November where he said one road department worker improperly totaled up their sick, vacation and holiday hours as 16 when it should be zero.
"The trustees should be better managers and they should handle this," Bosley said. "This is a problem waiting to happen."
Bosley said with him getting the county's revenue estimate certificates later than expected, it forced him and the trustees to come up with rough estimates of their own on what the revenue forecast would be when appropriating funds.
Kandel, who's the deputy director of finance for Stark County Job and Family Services, blames the trustees, which then included Bosley for approving a resolution with incorrect pay rates for road department workers.
He said the rates should have been lower for probationary workers per a union contract. Yet the trustees mistakenly approved higher rates, Kandel said.
And he says the missing records were in the township filing cabinets in the road department office at 4915 North Nickelplate St. when he ended his term as fiscal officer in March 2020. Kandel said Bosley moved the filing cabinets. Bosley said the paper receipts and signed paper records were not in the cabinets when he took office, but the township still has the electronic copies.
Bosley said he moved the cabinets and township fiscal office to 8000 Columbus Road NE because the township's financial records were not secure.
Kandel said he could not comment on the other errors attributed to the township in 2019 while he was fiscal officer. As he no longer has access to the township books.
Trustee George Kiko says the transition to a new payroll system at the end of 2020 may have caused the pay errors. And he said maintaining the financial records of the township is the job of the fiscal officer.
Kiko said the trustees exempted the road department workers from submitting their hours through the new payroll system because those workers did not trust Bosley's office to accurately process their pay.
Harold in an email wrote that Nimishillen Township gets the county budget commission's certified budget revenue estimates in the same manner as all the other cities, townships and villages in the county. And Harold wrote he was unaware of any other community reporting they were getting revenue certificates too late.
The state auditor's report pins the responsibility for the payroll issues on Kandel and Bosley.
It's issued a finding of recovery for the overpaid money against the three road department employees. If the employees fail to repay the money or the township fails to deduct the amounts from future pay, Kandel and his bond insurer would be liable for $345 and Bosley and his bond insurer would be liable for $1,805.
Transition
Bosley, then a Nimishillen Township trustee, was elected the township's fiscal officer in 2019 without opposition. He took office April 1, 2020. Kandel was the fiscal officer for the eight prior years.
State auditors said they found the following:
Pay to the three road department workers that did not match the hours as submitted on time sheets and at rates that did not match the pay rates approved by the trustees. This took place in 2019 and 2020 under Kandel and then Bosley. While the auditors found some underpayments, they were outweighed by the overpayments. The finding for recovery was issued against one employee for $1,023, the second employee for $1,102 and $25 against a third employee. Bosley noted that none of the employees ever reported being overpaid.
At least three situations in 2020 and two situations in 2019 when the township improperly posted refunds and property tax deductions in the wrong funds. For example, the state auditor's report said that $29,892 in property tax deductions were incorrectly posted to the township's general fund. They should have been posted to the road and bridge fund, the fire district fund, the road district fund and the lighting district fund. It's not clear if the 2020 errors took place before Kandel left office.
The township trustees for 2020 appropriated $1,909 more money than permitted by a revenue forecast certificate to repay a bond. And they in 2019 appropriated more than half a million dollars more than permitted in spending by the township fire fund. There's no indication the township ever had a negative cash balance in those funds.
The township fiscal officer under Kandel in 2019 submitted inaccurate figures for the cost of a capital lease that didn't include $153,047 in principal and interest payments.
The original receipts and corresponding paper documentation for 2019 have disappeared. By law, local governments must keep and safeguard public records including financial documents and receipts and can only dispose of them under a retention policy.
Failure to properly record in the right category capital lease proceeds in 2019 in the amount of $1.27 million as well as $44,000 in interest and fiscal charges in 2020.
The township's lease of a snowplow truck for $109,852 in November 2020 was not properly recorded in financial statements.
In 2019 and 2020, the trustees approved total appropriations and estimated receipts for funds that did not match the certified revenue estimates by the county budget commission. For example, the trustees for 2019 approved a revenue estimate of $1.93 million for the township fire fund. But the Budget Commission determined a figure of $2.96 million in revenue from the township's fire levy.
Bosley in his written reply to the state said that his office has corrected the errors and only made the errors because it was following the processes put in place by Kandel. He wrote that in-person training for him and his staff was not available during the pandemic. When he called the state auditor's office seeking help, no one answered the phone.
“I haven’t said I haven’t made a mistake," said Bosley, who added that Kandel's fiscal office staff all resigned before Bosley took office. "(The year) 2020 was a very hard year because most offices were not open. When I took office there, I was on my own. There was no one else with experience. There was no one here to help.”
In a Nimishillen Township trustee's meeting in February, Sandy Smith, who was Kandel's fiscal assistant, said that she had made herself available to train Bosley and his new assistant to replace her for weeks before she left. But Bosley didn't show up until her last day. Bosley said he had trained briefly under Kandel.
Reach Robert at (330) 580-8327 or robert.wang@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @rwangREP.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Overpayments, errors in financial reporting and missing receipts
