Posted on 03/03/2005 12:32:11 AM PST by Liz
For eight years, the top officials of an affluent Long Island school district systematically plundered taxpayer funds, illegally diverting at least $11.2 million to themselves, relatives and cronies for an array of goods and services, from a 65-cent bagel to a $1,812-a-night hotel suite to a mortgage on a luxury home in Florida, a new state audit says.
The scandal, in Roslyn, N.Y., is the most pervasive such school fraud in the country, say officials from the National School Boards Association. The year-old case has already had repercussions in districts throughout New York State, where school officials and bookkeepers say they are paying closer attention to budgets and accounts, and state auditors have stepped up their scrutiny.
The report, issued yesterday by the state comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, examines the district's records from 1996 to 2004, and it reveals far deeper and wider corruption than previously disclosed. It found losses of $3 million more than was estimated last spring, when the first allegations became public. It also documents and analyzes unauthorized spending and account manipulation well beyond what school officials and the district attorney had previously detailed.
Besides using district funds to cover $1.1 million in cash withdrawals on personal credit cards, district officials shopped extravagantly at taxpayers' expense, the records show. The purchases included $18,605 for artwork from Galerie Lassen on Maui in Hawaii, $14,033 for pet supplies, $19.95 for vitamins, $81,637 to repay a college loan, $3.05 for a latte and $4,045 to a company for such merchandise as a manicure and pedicure kit, a Sony shower radio and an Aquabot Ultra Pool Cleaner with remote control.
The losses went undetected for so long, officials have speculated, because of Roslyn residents' pride in the district's stellar academic achievements. The district, on Long Island's North Shore, has 3,300 students and a 95 percent graduation rate, and a healthy share of its graduates go off to Ivy League colleges every year. The superintendent at the time, Frank A. Tassone, also had impressed and charmed the school board and parents.
Criminal investigations have already led to grand larceny indictments of Dr. Tassone and the district's former business manager and a former clerk, all of whom have pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors said they were reviewing the latest findings and considering further charges.
Dr. Tassone's lawyer, Ed Jenks, said he had not seen the audit but argued that many expenses were legitimate. "He was allowed one international trip a year," he said.
"It doesn't say in the contract whether he can take the Concorde or swim across the Atlantic."
The audit also said there were 26 additional beneficiaries, and it hinted that sharing in the money might have tempered some district employees' enthusiasm for blowing the whistle. The auditors cautioned, however, that at least some of the beneficiaries might have been innocent recipients of gifts.
Those gifts were at the expense of taxpayers; the property tax for homeowners in Roslyn averages $9,700 a year. In four years, the district's tax levy rose by half, from $46 million in 2000 to $69 million in 2004.
"Taxpayers are furious, and they have a right to be furious," Mr. Hevesi said at a news conference in Garden City, N.Y., hours before making an unusual presentation of the audit to residents at the high school last night.
"We're going to clean this up," he said. "We're going to put the systems in to make sure this never happens again."
One indignant parent who turned out for Mr. Hevesi's briefing said she wanted everyone involved to be punished.
"The degree of the embezzlement is so massive, the scope and magnitude of this is horrific," said the parent, Jeannette Elsner, one of about 200 residents at the 7:30 p.m. meeting. "It sickens me."
The audit concluded that Dr. Tassone took a total of $2.4 million, and his former assistant superintendent for business, Pamela Gluckin, was responsible for $4.6 million in unauthorized spending. Ms. Gluckin's lawyer did not return a call seeking comment.
Continued here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/nyregion/03roslyn.html?8br
You have mail!
Dims view taxpayers as nothing more than bodies by which they can extract untold funds that the pols then divvy up among themselves, dole out to the special interest constituencies, in order to get the votes to stay in office.
I'm still looking! All I know so far is his name..Andrew Miller of CPA firm Miller, Lily & Pearce. I'll keep trying to find out more info.
This example is of one of the flaws in having a democratic form of gov't. If such things happen in sub-Sarahan Africa nobody is surprised. We need to wake up and be aware of this while we are busy state-building other places.
Most of the federal dollars go for upper mangement anyway..
When federal school dollars go to mostly democrat upper management nationally expecting HONESTY both on the federal level but MORE in the States on the use of those funds is...
SILLY (expecting honesty that is).......
Schools are and have been a democrat cash cow.. FOR DECADES...
Open up THIS Pandoras Box of corruption and it will effect everything from pBS to tenure in acedemia to kindergarten.. even to the building of the schools and the school bus system.. I don't think the New York Slimes has that in mind at all with this article.. A national audit of ALL schools is NOT going to HAPPEN (I mean a REAL audit)...
WHY?... (Eddie Murphy laugh)...
Good point. The thieves are not only stealing taxpayers' assets they are exploiting our freedoms, undermining democracy, corrupting our way of life and reducing the glories of the USA to the base level of a Third World banana republic.
An audit is needed in every school district across this state.
One can only wonder why our taxes are so bloody high here.
Jeeeeesh!
Another example of one of the big problems in developing countries is rent-seeking. This leads to corruption and cronyism, and there are some signs of the tendency beginning in the USA such as in New London. We don't need the state to be involved in economy building here because we already have institutional demand, we need the state to be out of business. Iraq and Zimbabwe need to build institutional demand and reduce the scope of gov't. Different situations and we don't want to start creating problems that developing countries are trying to climb out of.
When did Ernest Borgnine get cosmetic dental treatment.
Boy when Jews and Italians get together, the outcome is mixed at best. You got this, you got Las Vegas, you got.....the crucifixion.
Ba Dump Bump Ching
BTW: Places like Roslyn and Great Neck only have high test scores and graduation rates due to the fact that the parents in those communities push their kids to succeed. It has little to do with the teachers or corrupt administrators.
After having three go through the Great Neck South district I'd have to disagree with you.
I attended a very exclusive private school in Old Westbury and the same intellectual sloth you find in Hempstead High can be found there too. The difference is that in Old Westbury the parents have money to save the wee ones from their stupidity.
Of course, the more ambitious (and we hope talented) teachers will always be more attracted to the schools with better quality students, so to a certain extent, these districts will have better teachers. However, for the amount of money people in Millburn or Great Neck pay in property taxes, I could send my kids to private school.
My taxes in Great Neck aren't as bad as they might be, certainly less than it would have cost to pay for three kids times four years at private school. The key to the success rates at GNS have as much to do with the culture of valuing education as with the money in the district. There are other problems (some kids with way too much, balkanization by the students from 8th grade on) but a truly world class education can be had here.
Gov't corruption from top to bottom----they've all got their hands in the till.
It is a "tribal" community after all (per a grad school classmate of mine from Great Neck who was MOT).
Kids tend to segregate themselves from 8th Grade through college. When they get into the "real world" (depending on what profession they enter, of course) they realize they can't segregate themselves as much as they used to.
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