Subpoenas for everyone
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- April
- 18
State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced this afternoon that he is expanding his pension-fraud investigation to include all 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services in the state. He is seeking information about the nature of employment agreements BOCES offices have with professional consultants.
This is the second expansion of a probe that started by looking into potentially fraudulent employment arrangements between public school districts and lawyers. The attorney general widened that this week to encompass all forms of local governments across New York, incuding more than 4,000 county governments, villages, towns and special districts. Previously, his office issued multiple subpoenas to lawyers and firms on Long Island and upstate.
“We have reason to believe some BOCES may have unclean hands in this situation and there may have been financial benefits for the BOCES to list professionals as employees instead of as independent consultants,” Cuomo said in a statement. “There appears to be chronic fraud that has occurred across New York State for many years, and we will work until we get to the bottom of it.”
Fradulently placing people on public payrolls “can cost New Yorkers tens of millions of dollars by giving pension benefits to those who would otherwise be ineligible and by giving unwarranted state aid to school districts,” Cuomo said.
At least some attorneys did not actually provide legal services for BOCES or school districts in question they were being paid by, and some were on payrolls for such a long time or were on so many at the same time that they accumulated substantial credits in the retirement system, according to Cuomo. One attorney was listed on the payrolls of as many as seven BOCES and school districts in one year and may have already collected more than $700,000 in taxpayer-funded pension benefits, according to Cuomo.
This entry was posted
on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 6:45 pm by Cara Matthews.
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The answer is to indict everyone involved in this scam, in however many districts it turns out to be.
Ditto. The baby steamroller is busy rolling his path to the state house.
And man, I am not interested in listening to another Cuomo patronize for four years. It just seems that only he and our new comptroller take any notice at all of the outrages that plague this state.
he ought to subpoena sam zherka and the guardian
for expending thousands of dollars in non
filed expenditures on the robertson campaign
in viotion of new york state election law