Mount Desert official resigns over errors

MOUNT DESERT – Local officials have accepted the resignation of the town’s finance director and are working to resolve issues that came to light during a recent audit of the town’s finances, the town manager said Wednesday.

Brent Hamor, Mount Desert’s finance director, abruptly left his post this week after James Wadman, a certified public accountant in Ellsworth, sent selectmen a four-page letter detailing improper accounting procedures and deficiencies that turned up in his audit.

Many of the issues deal with improper and inaccurate accounting procedures, according to the letter. According to Michael MacDonald, Mount Desert’s town manager, another incident involved nearly $15,000 in checks and cash that went missing last July.

MacDonald said Wednesday that the cash and checks disappeared from the town office before they could be deposited. Approximately $13,700 of the money was in checks that were never cashed or deposited, he said. The rest, $1,227 in cash, has not been found.

No other money has been determined to be missing, according to MacDonald. He said town officials are taking steps to address issues raised in the audit.

“It’s not something to be dismissed,” he said. “It is very serious.”

Attempts on Wednesday and Thursday to contact Hamor about his resignation were unsuccessful. The former finance director provided no details for his decision in the resignation letter he wrote to selectmen on June 2.

“Please accept this as formal notice of my resignation as Mount Desert Finance Director, effective June 16, 2008,” is the only sentence in Hamor’s letter.

According to Wadman’s letter to selectmen, another accounting deficiency involves the town spending $54,000 that voters had approved at town meeting last December for a local sewer plant project. The problem was that the money was spent before the end of the year and before the budget voters had approved went into effect on Jan. 1, 2008.

The audit also revealed that the town had improperly included an assessment of $210,315 twice last year in developing its budget, which resulted in an insufficiently low tax rate for property owners. The inaccurate assessment left the town $210,315 short in its tax revenues, according to the audit.

MacDonald said that the town is confident it can make up the tax revenue shortfall by spending less and with excess revenues.

Among other deficiencies revealed by the audit were:

. Cash deposits that were not made on a timely basis.

. Taxes, liens receivable, accounts receivable and bank statements that had not been reconciled properly each month.

. More than $2.3 million that had not been transferred properly into reserve funds.

. Cash receipts that had not been recorded accurately.

MacDonald said that, as far as the missing money, the town has contacted the parties who wrote the checks but never had the money removed from their accounts to write new checks to the town. More than half the money represented by the missing checks has been recovered, he said.

He said the town has consulted the Maine Municipal Association and the Hancock County District Attorney’s Office and has decided that none of the problems detailed in the audit warrant a criminal investigation.

Because none of the missing checks was cashed or deposited, it seems unlikely that someone purposefully stole them, the town manager said, and it likely would be hard to prove if the incident were suspected of being a deliberate act.

The town has advertised for a new finance director and hopes to hire a new one by the end of September, according to MacDonald. In the meantime, the town has hired a part-time accountant and some town officials are temporarily picking up other duties to help resolve the issues until a new finance director is hired, he said.

The town is in the process of changing the time frame of its annual fiscal year, and so is nearing the end of a six-month budget. A new 12-month budget and fiscal year are expected to begin July 1.

Wadman is expected to perform another audit on the town’s finances, this time on the current six-month budget, in October, according to MacDonald. But the town will not hesitate to address any further accounting deficiencies that might come to light before then, he said.

“There wasn’t adequate oversight [of the town’s finance department],” MacDonald said. “I ultimately am responsible.”

btrotter@bangordailynews.net

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