Buscemi, Schreib facing $17,000 fraud charges
Monroe County has implemented new auditing and record-keeping procedures in one of its human services agencies after a former employee and a contractor were arrested on charges they used phony records to steal more than $17,000 in tax money from the county.
The former employee, Carl M. Buscemi Sr., was a coordinator of the county Office for the Aging’s emergency weatherization program, which pays for work on furnaces, hot water heaters and windows at the homes of qualifying senior citizens.
The 59-year-old Buscemi is accused of dummying up records so that the contractor was paid for work he did not do.
Buscemi, a Fairport resident, was arrested on Jan. 12 and arraigned in Rochester City Court the following day on 36 felony counts — one count of third-degree grand larceny, one count of defrauding the government, 17 counts of falsifying records and 17 counts of filing false statements.
The contractor, Todd J. Schreib, 43, was arraigned on Jan. 14 on the same counts as Buscemi minus the defrauding the government charge.
Both pleaded not guilty and were released.
Reached by phone, Schreib declined to comment Wednesday. Buscemi could not be reached, and neither defendant’s lawyer returned a call for comment.
The alleged wrongdoing came to light in October after the daughter of an elderly homeowner called the Office for the Aging to inquire about payment for window replacement work, according to witness depositions included in court papers.
Apparently by coincidence, Buscemi had just been terminated by the county for falsifying his time card, county spokesman Noah Lebowitz said Wednesday. “It appears that he was billing the county for time that he was not working.”
Once the call triggered questions about Buscemi, a full audit of his work was done.
The allegations raise questions about oversight of the federally funded emergency weatherization program. According to depositions in court files, a simple phone call to property owners would have uncovered the fact that emergency weatherization work had not been done at those homes.
One property owner also noted in his deposition that the $475 in phony “furnace repairs” done at his rental house had been done pursuant to a purported complaint of a furnace that was giving off no heat — but the complaint was made in August, when furnaces typically are shut off.
Monroe County officials and sheriff’s investigators uncovered 17 instances between January 2007 and October 2009 when they believe phony invoices or other records were used to divert a total of $17,195 to Schreib’s company, TJ’s Heating & Cooling.
In most cases, records indicate the property owners had never sought help from the Office for the Aging. In a few other cases, the county office had arranged for some work at the property — but not the work for which TJ’s Heating & Cooling was paid.
Lebowitz said it is believed that only Buscemi and Schreib were involved in the falsifications, and that all the instances of wrongdoing have been detected.
The county spokesman acknowledged the old system in the emergency weatherization program allowed a single employee to authorize contractor work and then verify that it was done, with no independent oversight. Under new provisions, that unit is subject to random audits “to verify that work was actually performed,” Lebowitz said.
There also is enhanced record-keeping to ensure recipients are eligible for the services they get.
Other new procedures requiring some employees to more carefully log their activities led to the discovery that Buscemi was fudging his time card, Lebowitz said.
Those two issues — fudged time-cards and inadequate oversight of work done by contractors — also were elements in the larger Robutrad scandal that rocked county government last year.
In that case, a county employee and workers for Robutrad Corp., which provided skilled trades workers for county projects, were charged with swindling taxpayers out of thousands of dollars by doing outside work on county time.
