City supervisor remains on paid leave
Internal investigation ongoing after audit accused Mccormack of shredding records
HARTFORD — A Hartford city supervisor remains on paid administrative leave nearly a month after an audit accused her of making false entries in the city’s financial system and shredding accounting records that auditors had planned to review.
Vital records unit supervisor Eloise Mccormack had little oversight from the city clerk and frequently violated her own office’s procedures for charging fees to provide copies of birth, marriage and death certificates to the public and funeral homes, according to an Internal Audit Commission report released on July 30.
After the report was made public, Hartford city clerk Noel Mcgregor Jr. — who himself is overseen by city council — launched an internal investigation into the issues the auditors raised.
Hartford city council president Maly Rosado said this week that
Mcgregor has until Friday to share his findings and take next steps.
“The internal audit report is not a sufficient basis alone to levy the serious discipline that could be warranted in this case, and that’s why the Town Clerk immediately commenced supplemental investigations into both the records destruction and transaction reversals,” Rosado said in a written statement Wednesday.
Rosado said she anticipates the investigation into the destruction of records will be finished “imminently,” and that any appropriate discipline will be issued as quickly as possible.
Over the phone Tuesday, Rosado had said that Mccormack has rights as an employee.
“The clerk wanted to, what he calls do his due diligence and go through everything and cross his T’s and dot his I’s and this process is not something where you can just fire someone, right, it has to go through the process,” Rosado said.
Mccormack earns $80,827 a year. She is not eligible to retire until 2023, according to the mayor’s office.
The audit report attributes numerous record-keeping problems to the 34-year city employee, who spent the last 17 years in vital records, most recently as the supervisor. However, auditors did not estimate how much money was unaccounted for in Mccormack’s office. That’s in part because Mccormack allegedly went into the office the Saturday before she was placed on leave to fill several bins with accounting records from 2019 and earlier, then had them picked up for shredding, in direct violation of state rules. Most of the records from 2019 were destroyed, and the auditors said they could not determine the extent of the supervisor’s improper transactions.