A lawsuit has officially been filed against Trumbull County Auditor Martha Yoder on Wednesday in connection with more than $80,000 in taxpayer money still missing from the township due to a scam.

This comes after the Bazetta Township Board of Trustees unanimously voted to sue Yoder during a meeting on Saturday.

Trustee Mike Hovis told 21 News the Board and its attorney have been getting nowhere in trying to get the Yoder to pay the money back to them, so the only recourse now is to file a suit against her.

"We just want our taxpayers' money returned to our community. Simple as that," Hovis said.

The funds went missing in early September after an employee at the Trumbull County Auditor's Office fell victim to a scam where a scammer impersonated Bazetta Township's Fiscal Officer and asked that over $80,000 in taxpayer money be transferred to a new bank account. 

Yoder previously told 21 News this happened because Bazetta's Fiscal Officer did not have a two-factor authentication system in place for her email account, meaning all a hacker would need is a password to gain access to the account.

However, Hovis said the Auditor's Office was to blame in this incident stating that the employee should have noticed certain oddities in the email such as misspellings and an incorrect telephone number.

Hovis further told 21 News on Monday that the Auditor's Office has since changed its policy on changing banks to deposit township funds stating that these changes must now be done in person.

Hovis says he takes this policy change as an "admission of guilt" from Yoder.

"If you're not at fault, why do you change your standard operating procedure for all your employees to follow. Not only that, she sends it out to all the fiscal officers of Trumbull County, all the school boards, townships, cities, anybody that she deals with that this is now the procedure. To me, that's an admission of guilt," Hovis said.

Furthermore, the lawsuit states that even before this policy change was made, the Ohio Auditor of State provided a memo to all public offices with instructions on how to protect public funds.

These instructions included looking for red flags in any correspondence regarding rerouting funds and not to make any changes to vendor, financial institution, employee contact information or banking information without independent verification.

The memo even suggested avoiding redirecting funds electronically stating in-person communication is always best for verifying a request's authenticity.

"Rather than requiring in-person verification for change requests to payment information, as mandated by the [memo], [Yoder] accepted a change to the Bazetta Township bank payment information with just an email with the new routing and account number. She did not even require an original signature," the suit reads.

The suit goes on to claim that Yoder did not provide her employees a copy of this memo.

"If [Yoder] had implemented the instructions from [the memo] when it was issued, the email request to change the Bazetta Township bank would never have been accepted, and [Yoder] would have avoided the loss of more than eighty thousand dollars in public funds," the suit reads.

In response to Yoder's argument that the township is responsible for the loss due to the lack of a two-factor authentication system, the suit states that this suggestion came from a newsletter from a private entity and not a document provided by a government office.

"A newsletter from a private entity giving advice on best practices does not create a legal duty and certainly does not excuse [Yoder] from failing to comply with her statutory duties and express instructions from the Ohio Auditor of State," the suit reads.

21 News has reached out to Yoder for comment and we received the following statement:

"Our attorney has been working diligently to try to come to a fair resolution with Bazetta for more than a month.  I have maintained that the predominant fact is that were it not for the disabling by the Township of the multifactor authentication, this fraud would not have occurred, and that until  the Township owns this responsibility, determining liability for this loss cannot even begin.  Our efforts towards resolution have insisted that the Township take the primary responsibility; and that once that happens, we can discuss division of liability. "

"The Township has rejected this, and insists that we take full liability."

"I welcome having this case heard before a court and settled in that appropriate forum rather than in the media.

 

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