Government
‘A Lot of Horse Poop’: Officials Seek To Discredit Treasurer’s Claims of Financial Problems at Town Hall
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The town treasurer’s recent assertions that he lacks full access to all municipal bank accounts while some former public workers have retained login access—even after their employment with New Canaan had ended—are flat-out false, officials said Tuesday morning. Additionally, Treasurer Andrew Brooks himself does not have the ability to “scrub” the names of former municipal workers from New Canaan’s bank accounts as indicated during a public meeting last month, according to officials with the bank that the town uses. In fact, according to Barbara Hart, senior vice president of government and institutional banking at Webster Bank, it’s an industry best practice to preserve a record of the names of those who previously had access to municipal bank accounts for seven years. “We give people online access according to the specifications set forth during the implementation period, so when setting up a new customer like the town of New Canaan, we figure out who has what access,” Hart told members of the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting, held in Town Hall. “And we grant passwords and user IDs based on the level of access at the account level, user level –we give very, very finite limits to each user and those limits are captured in our system.