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The crooks were not masterminds by any stretch of the imagination. The reality is that this was a giveaway.
If there is something to be learned from Warren County’s sloppy bill-paying, it is how easily the bad guys were able to swindle Warren County out of $3.2 million of taxpayer money.
It’s all laid out in SAX Advisory Group’s report on how this happened and what needs to be done to prevent further theft in the future.
But before the report could even get a good reading from the public, the Warren County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Wednesday to introduce a local law creating a Warren County Department of Finance “to improve financial oversight of taxpayer funds.”
Warren County was locking the barn door after the horses ran off with $3.2 million in taxpayer funds.
It also shows the supervisors have no trust in the Treasurer’s Office.
A public hearing on the proposed law will be held on Friday, Sept. 18 that will be streamed on YouTube, while residents can email county supervisors through this link.
There appears to be lots of potential blame to go around here.
Here is what SAX said happened.
In November 2024, the county Treasurer’s Office implemented a new process allowing venders to elect payment via “automated clearing house (ACH)” money transfers without the approval of the Board of Supervisors. Vendors had requested the new procedure.
No formalized procedure was developed for these money transfers, and the previous treasurer left in June 2025.
On November 13, 2025, a bad guy posing as a representative of Peckham Industries contacted staff in the Treasurer’s Office and asked about changing the county’s payment method for Peckham from check to ACH. Peckham had a long relationship with the Department of Public Works.
The Treasurer’s Office directed the person to the publicly accessible ACH authorization form on the Treasurer’s Office website that had been developed in November 2024.
The bad guys submitted banking information that was put into the county’s financial system without independent verification from the Department of Public Works or the county’s contact at Peckham.
Before the money was paid out, a representative from Arrow Bank contacted the Treasurer’s Office to confirm the payment was legitimate, because the payment exceeded the $2 million limit for ACH payments as specified by the banking agreement between the county and the bank. The ACH payment was confirmed by the deputy treasurer. It was later learned that Arrow Bank told the deputy treasurer that the payment was “potentially fraudulent.”
Arrow paid the $2.1 million.
And the money was gone.
And it gets worse.
The fraudsters returned on Dec, 23, 2025 and submitted a second payment via ACH for $1.2 million. The second payment was also flagged by the bank as being possibly fraudulent. Bank representatives called the deputy treasurer again and again the payment was approved.
The report found the Treasurer’s Office never got independent verification for the payments.
Also on December 23, 2025, Peckham Industries contacted the county and wanted to know why it had not been paid. It was only then that law enforcement was called about a possible fraud.
There is so much more to this disaster that you really need to read the report for yourself.
Apparently, Peckham had warned Warren County about possible fraud, but it is unclear who knew what and when and if that information ever got to the Treasurer’s Office.
This one passage of the report stuck out to me particularly:
“We understand through interviews conducted that there are disputes between county personnel over specific facts regarding events surrounding the ACH fraud,” the SAX report says. “These disputes were heightened by a number of public statements made at Board of Supervisors and county committee meetings, which contributed to negative interpersonal interactions and added difficulty to the process of investigating and preparing this report.”
In other words, there was a lot of finger-pointing among the county officials.
“We also note that neither we nor the county has been provided with the findings of the law enforcement investigation into this matter as of the date of this report,” the SAX report states. “As a result, certain facts surrounding the events remain unresolved and outside the scope of information available to us.”
In other words, transparency has not been achieved.
But obviously, the supervisors no longer have confidence in the Treasurer’s Office since they are proposing an entirely new department take over previous duties of the Treasurer’s Office.
An enormous number of questions still need to be answered.
“The Board of Supervisors has reviewed extensive amounts of information regarding the unfortunate theft of taxpayer money, and the actions that led up to it,” said Kevin Geraghty, chairman of the Warren County Board of Supervisors, in a statement. “We have worked with the Warren County Attorney’s Office to make needed changes out of an obligation to act to protect taxpayer funds at all times, and ensure that a theft like this does not happen again. An appointed Commissioner of Finance would report to the Board of Supervisors and ensure the effective management of our county’s finances, and better serve the needs of our citizens in today’s financial landscape.”
Warren County also stated that a criminal investigation into the thefts is ongoing, and efforts to recover the money that was stolen from Warren County are ongoing.
If you would like to help any local organization fund a fact-checking event hosted by Mary Miller of the New York Publishers Foundation, you can make a donation directly to the foundation. Here is what Mary had to say:
If people wish to donate directly to the foundation they can either use the link at the bottom of this email and send me a follow-up email about their donation. I will acknowledge. Or, if they prefer to send a check, a donation should be made to the New York Newspapers Foundation, and mailed to 252 Hudson Ave, Albany, NY 12210 with a short note indicating what the money should be used for.
North Country Public Radio did another one of its excellent deep dives, this time into a pilot program in Johnsburg that helps senior citizens remain in their homes by providing assistance to make improvements to their residences.
The program will continue with a new $15,000 grant from AARP and will allow the town to take on larger projects
“The idea is to help seniors stay in their home as long as possible and be safe and happy,” Johnsburg public property and programs director Pete Olesheski told NCPR’s David Escobar.
Last fall, Olesheski began assessing homes occupied by seniors, identifying small changes that could help residents more easily navigate their homes.
“We focused mostly on things like entrance lighting, motion-activated lighting and we did some work in a few bathrooms,” he said. “But it was relatively limited.”
They will be able to do more this year.
More towns in the region should look into establishing programs just like this.
Check out the entire NCPR story:
NCPR: Johnsburg Seniors Program
At the end of the movie event at Crandall library earlier this week, a man told me he had just bought one of my books at Fort William Henry.
It was nice to hear.
All my books, including The Last American Newspaper, are available at Ace Hardware in Queensbury, Chapman Museum in Glens Falls and Battenkill Books in Cambridge.
Tickets for the play are currently on sale at Capital Rep website, and its three-week run begins on Sept. 25.
An ICE agent was arrested in May on charges of shooting a man and then lying about the reasons why. The agent was arrested on the Minnesota charges after he fired his gun through a door and wounded a man. The agent accused the man of attacking him with a broom handle and snow shovel.
The Minnesota attorney general sued the governor of Texas on Tuesday to force the extradition of the ICE agent.
“Minnesota officials have clashed with the federal government over who has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute federal officers for on-duty conduct,” The Associated Press wrote. “(Attorney General Keith) Ellison is a Democrat and (Texas Gov. Greg) Abbott is a Republican ally of President Donald Trump.”
Minnesota is asking the ICE agent be released by the state of Texas.
Politifact, the nonprofit fact-checking outfit operated by the Poynter Institute, took on a big project as it tried to discern what subject President Trump was spending most of his time talking about.
“As our team monitored Trump’s public events this summer, we noticed a trend. He seemed to spend an unusual amount of time talking about the Reflecting Pool, White House ballroom and other construction projects in Washington, D.C.,” Politifact wrote. “In the first PolitiFact project of its kind, we decided to see just how much Trump focused on capital improvements compared with the Iran war, his immigration policies, legislative priorities and inflation.”
It employed staff writers Caleb McCullough and Loreben Tuquero to analyze all of Trump’s recorded, spoken words from events in January through July in which he mentioned the construction projects.
Here is what they found:
Trump’s remarks on the construction projects added up to nearly 45,000 words since January.
He mentioned them at 84 events across 66 days, more than a quarter of all his public events during that period.
In events where the construction projects came up, he has talked more about the projects than topics such as the economy and immigration.
The only topic he talked about more during the events where he talked about construction was Iran and the Iran war, which took up nearly 56,000 words and came up in 73 of the 84 events.
While Donald Trump continues to claim that voting by mail cannot be trusted, he apparently voted by mail in the primaries in Florida this past week.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and his play “The Last American Newspaper” is being produced by Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany Sept. 25 to Oct. 18 . He currently lives in both Queensbury, N.Y. and New Orleans, La.
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