December 11, 2021

Why did Lisa Moore do it? Why didn’t the Kennett Township supervisors realize what was going on? And what has been done since?

Residents have repeatedly asked questions like those since the April 2019 discovery that Moore, the former township manager, had been embezzling what would later be identified as $3.2 million in township funds.

Those questions and others were addressed in a special Kennett Township meeting Tuesday, almost two years after the supervisors held a special meeting when Moore was first charged by the Chester County District Attorney’s office and about two months after Moore pleaded guilty in county court.

“It is some consolation to finally be able to talk … about both the enormous tragedy and mess of Lisa Moore’s crimes against Kennett Township,” Supervisor Scudder Stevens said.

Moore is currently serving 3-10 years in the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, a state penitentiary for women near Williamsport, Pa.

The special public meeting about Moore was held both in-person and virtually over Zoom. A transcript of the meeting will be available in a few days, according to township staff.

Supervisors’ Chairman Richard Leff said the embezzlement “plunged Kennett Township into crisis,” and explained the special meeting would address “how the township today has emerged from the depths of that financial emergency.

“A great deal has transpired since we held our first public meeting” in December 2019, when the criminal investigation into Moore was made public.

Leff recalled that day in spring 2019 when a fraud analyst at Capital One Bank called him, starting what he described as a nightmare for the township.

“It was an awful day, and it was filled with one horrible discovery after another,” Leff said. “Every day brought new lessons.”

Like the day that Stevens, an attorney as well as a supervisor, was heading home from court and received a phone call from the township police chief. The chief wanted Stevens to meet him at the bank to look at checks and then called him back to say he would bring the checks to Stevens.

“When I got to the township, I was met by both the [police] chief, a member of the district attorney’s office, and [county Detective Robert] Balchunis,” Stevens said. “They laid out in front of me a dozen different checks, and they were all signed by me. Every one of my signatures was exactly the same. It was very clear that I didn’t sign any of them, and I didn’t recognize them.”

All the checks were payable to Moore, Leff said.

Authorities searched Moore’s office and found two rubber stamps in her desk bearing Stevens’ signature.

“We had in place requirements that checks over a minimum amount had to be signed by two people,” he said. “They were signed by Lisa Moore and a rubber stamp.”

The supervisors also soon found evidence that Moore forged documents. She would use Adobe Photoshop to take signature blocks from documents and use them in other documents,” supervisors’ Vice Chairwoman Whitney Hoffman said.

“Even after we fired her, she kept stealing,” Leff said, describing automatic transfers from the township accounts into her personal accounts. One of those was for automatic charges for parking in Rehoboth Beach, Del.

“Lisa had the township credit card hooked up to a parking app that she used when she was parking her car in Rehoboth,” Hoffman said. “We initially asked for her computer back but didn’t get it back right away. We took her phone number back as well and put her phone number on another cell phone.”

With Moore’s township email and cell phone, Hoffman got access to the PayPal account Moore was using and stopped the automatic payments.

She added that even before Moore was fired, she was adept at diverting questions about finances. Hoffman said when she first started as a supervisor, she asked Moore about a forensic audit and was told it was too expensive.

“I came in to Lisa and said, ‘Hey, I think we have to look at how we’re spending money,’” Hoffman said. “She’s like, ‘You’re right and we really need to look at that, but what we really need to do is look at this which is really important.’”

Stevens encountered the same thing during his first year as a supervisor.

“There were things we tried to put into place that would have solved this problem, but she went around us,” he said, adding that a finance committee he created back then was slowly taken over by Moore.

“She was really good at distracting you,” Leff said. “In retrospect maybe there were signs, but they were so subtle and so slow that you didn’t see them … Yes, we were looking at finances, but she slowly took away all the checks we had in place. It was a hard lesson.”

Two commonalities between Moore and others who have embezzled, according to Ricardo Zayas, the forensic accountant from Marcum LLP who was hired by the township to investigate the embezzlement, were the ability to engender trust and the ability to manipulate.

“Ms. Moore was a trusted person in this township, not only by supervisors but with citizens,” Zayas said. “She was in a position to use her intelligence and relationships she had developed over the years for her own benefit. “

In Zayas’ business, the motivation to embezzle in cases like these is difficult, if not impossible, to figure out. Instead, he and his colleagues follow the evidence.

That evidence led to discoveries of things like inaccurate and omitted financial records and unauthorized payments to Moore that were funneled through different accounts. Marcum worked with the Chester County detectives to build a case against Moore, and on Dec. 10, 2019, she was formally charged with embezzlement.

Since 2019, Kennett Township has added, among other things, a new township manager, a finance director/human resources manager, and a finance department. The treasurer position is no longer held by the township manager, and segregation of duties was implemented among township staff.

In December 2019, the supervisors held a public meeting at the Red Clay Room that drew about 500 people, many of them angry and wanting answers that the board and township staff couldn’t give because it could endanger the criminal case. Tuesday’s meeting was more measured; Ratliff’s executive assistant, Gretchen Porterfield, read questions that residents had submitted either before the meeting or over the Zoom platform.

“At the meeting a couple years ago, people were quite concerned that the supervisors didn’t accept any responsibility for what happened,” resident Lynn Nathan asked at Tuesday’s meeting. “Do you accept any responsibility now? Can you say you’re sorry?”

Hoffman talked of the traumatic experience but also of the work the township has done to rebuild.

“I’m a different supervisor now than when I was then,” she said. “Yes, I’m sorry this occurred. But part of the real responsibility is rebuilding and making sure it never happens again.”

Stevens talked of the pain Moore’s embezzlement caused.

“I have absolutely no doubt that this (the embezzlement) was a pattern of behavior,” he said. “We put in auditors who were highly respected in the county and region; they didn’t catch it. The state audits our records as well. The state didn’t catch it.

“My regret is we didn’t stay close enough on it to discover it. But it takes the likes of Mr. Zayas to do that.”

Leff closed the meeting by thanking the supervisors, township staff, and consultants for their work, and the residents for their patience.

“In those terrible, early days there wasn’t a lot of trust in anyone,” Leff said. “You all stuck with us, gave us a chance to fix things. There’s still more to be done, and I believe we’re going to end up with a brighter future for Kennett Township.”