Thursday, November 23, 2017
Staff report
WARREN
A hearing is set for 10 a.m. next Thursday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court on a request by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office that Deborah Drawl, Mecca Township fiscal officer, be removed from office.
The request says she should be removed for knowingly refusing to keep the accounts of her office and to file reports required by the Ohio Auditor’s office.
Attempts to reach Drawl through the township hall and elsewhere were unsuccessful.
The filing says the state auditor hired an independent auditing firm to look at the township’s books starting in February and found “numerous problems,” including several unexplained financial entries, failure to reconcile the books for several months, a large lapse in recording revenues and failure to file a complete financial report for 2016 as required by law.
The state auditor’s office declared the township’s 2016 records “unauditable” on May 25 and gave Drawl 90 days to fix the problems.
In late September and early October, the auditing firm Perry & Associates and the state auditor again reviewed the township records and again found that they could not be audited, the filing says.
The attorney general requested an expedited hearing on removing Drawl so that “a new fiscal officer can put the financial records into a condition such that they can be audited,” the attorney general’s office said.