By Eric Francis, Standard Correspondent
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — The former treasurer of Hartland’s First Universalist Society Church was in court this week charged with stealing nearly $8,000 from the 214-year-old institution’s funds.
Tamara Ross, 44, of Hartland Four Corners pleaded innocent on Tuesday morning to a single felony count of embezzlement before she was released on personal recognizance.
Church officials told a Vermont State Police investigator that Ross had begun serving as their treasurer in 2014 but at a board meeting in April of 2015 questions were raised by the assistant treasurer, Dan Poor, about several transactions that Ross appeared to have carried out without authorization or explanation, according to documents filed with the court.
Items raising red flags included several cash withdrawals from the church’s bank account in amounts ranging from $300 to $1,000 at a time for items such as “seed money” for concerts or rummage sales which committee organizers did not recall ever needing nor receiving. There were also several occasions when the total amounts collected at church fundraisers exceeded the amounts that appeared to have ended up actually getting deposited back in the bank afterward.
Minister Paul Sawyer Jr. wrote that when the board looked over the “troubling” transactions they immediately cast a unanimous vote to remove Ross, who was not in attendance at the meeting, from her position. They also sent a notice to her asking her to return the church’s notebook computer along with the treasurer’s files and to work with the board to figure out what had happened to the missing money.
“Tamara did not arrange a meeting,” after receiving notice that she had been suspended from her post, Sawyer wrote, instead, “She left the files and the computer on the porch of our office building in a trash bag. She did not meet with church leaders and has not offered any explanations.”
After learning of the anomalies, the church’s Wisconsin-based insurance company hired a forensic accounting firm to look over all of the 2014 and early 2015 financial accounts and they sent back a report in which they concluded that a total of $7,910 had been misappropriated over the months by various methods.
“It appears Ross wrote unauthorized checks for cash and attempted to deceive board members by making these check appear to be fundraiser ‘seed money.’ Additionally, it appears she was not depositing all of the proceeds from the fundraisers and was keeping the funds for herself,” Susan Peters of Balance Edge Forensic Accounting and Investigations wrote in the summary of her report to the insurance company.
In September 2015 the insurer paid out $7,500 to the church, which was the upper limit of their policy coverage for such an event, reducing the total uninsured loss to $410.
Vermont State Police Trooper Gary Salvatore wrote in his affidavit that when he caught up with Ross in her driveway not far from the church this May he told her about the conclusions the forensic accounting firm had reached.
Salvatore wrote that after he told Ross she was going to be charged criminally “Tamara was reluctant to give me her side of the story but when I mentioned about the possibility of paying the money back she immediately advised that she offered to pay it back…to save her neck and avoid police involvement.”
“Tamara then stated she wasn’t admitting she took the money,” Salvatore continued, noting, “I told Tamara that she did take the money or why would she want to pay it back.”
“I asked what she used the money for and she advised it had been so long she couldn’t remember. (She said) that on nights she couldn’t make it to the bank the money would just be lying around her house and before she knew it she was spending it…(she) went on to say she didn’t know why she did this,” Trooper Salvatore said.
Ross wrote on her application for a public defender that she is divorced and living on Social Security which she did not leave her in a position to hire an attorney to defend herself.
Ross, who has no prior criminal record, faces a maximum potential penalty of up to 10 years in prison and the likelihood of being ordered to pay back the missing money if she were to be convicted.
This article first appeared in the June 30, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.