Posted on 08/05/2024 2:21:31 PM PDT by dennisw
An upstate village clerk accused of swiping more than $1 million — about the same amount as her town’s annual budget — will give up her pension in a historic New York forfeiture case.
Disgraced former Addison employee Ursula Stone, 55, allegedly stole $1,171,362 in village funds over at least 19 years — and is now the first politician to fork over her pension under New York’s anti-corruption law, state and county officials announced late last week.
“This case represents the most complete, and to be frank, shocking breach of public trust I have encountered in 30 years as a Steuben County prosecutor,” Steuben County District Attorney Brooks Baker said in a statement.
“The reality is that but for some real heads-up detection work by members of the State Comptroller’s staff, it would still be ongoing.”
Stone appeared in Steuben County Court on Thursday and agreed to forfeit her pension of $1,920 a month, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported.
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said it marked New York’s first pension forfeiture under anti-corruption measures passed as part of an ethics reform package in 2011 and expanded in 2017.
Though the law had never been wielded in court before, Stone’s case was a perfect fit because her alleged crimes “impacted that village on a day-to-day basis,” Baker said, according to the outlet.
A 2022 audit of the village by DiNapoli’s office found that Stone had been overseeing the village’s finances with no oversight or accountability, officials said.
She prepared payroll, maintained manual leave records and processed health insurance buyouts as well as unused leave payments — all without approval from the mayor or other village officials.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Village clerk? More like the village idiot... this is 2024 twit, computers, internet, surveillance etc...
Any jailtime?
Tip of iceberg. TRILLIONS have been stolen at the highest levels of government.
Or her bosses were getting a cut.
Well we know it’s a stupid state but no internal controls? Audits?
Cheatle needs to lose her pension, too.
Well deserved, but soon to be living off from public assistance.
Just the other day, we learned that $8.2 billion has "gone missing" from the foreign aid package for Ukraine. The gravy train for neo-Nazis (see Azov Battalion)& various others who are not on my list of favorite people.
Let's all remember that Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme disguised as cryptocurrency. What is not widely reported is that Ukrainian oligarchs were buying millions of dollars' worth of SBF crypto, then turning around & donating millions to Democratic candidates in the 2020-22 election cycles.
Originally, before it got into the hands of the oligarchs, the the money probably came from the US taxpayer, in the form of foreign aid. And this sort of thing happens all over the Third World, wherever we send foreign aid. The local kleptocrats always skim their cut right off the top.
Yasser Arafat was the Poster Boy for this. When he died, his widow became the richest woman in the Middle East.
If you let your daughter steal the cookies without punishment, she will grow up and steal the village.
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