CATO, NY. State auditors say the Town of Cato did not record about $1.1 million in cash moving through its books over the last four years and did not file a single Annual Financial Report with the state from 2018 through 2024.
The findings come from a New York State Comptroller audit released on March 27, 2026, audit number 2025M-141. The audit examined the supervisor’s records and reports for the period January 1, 2022 through November 6, 2025, and reviewed the town’s reporting history back through 2017.
Auditors found $348,817 in receipts and $744,572 in disbursements that the supervisor’s office failed to enter into the accounting records during the audit period. They also found nine handwritten checks totaling $7,403 that were never recorded, and one town employee who was overpaid by approximately $2,600 because payroll was not properly certified.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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The audit does not allege fraud, theft or any criminal conduct. It is a management audit. What it does say, in plain language, is that for the better part of a decade the town’s books and the town’s reports to the state were not what state law requires them to be.
Why $1.1 million matters in a town this size
Cato is a town of 2,445 people in northwestern Cayuga County, about 35 miles from downtown Syracuse. Its 2025 budgeted appropriations were $2.27 million, according to the audit. That means the unrecorded cash flow auditors flagged is equal to almost half of a single year’s town budget.
For a town with a population under 5,000, the law gives the supervisor 60 days after the close of the fiscal year to file an Annual Financial Report with the Office of the State Comptroller, with a possible 60-day extension. That filing is the document residents, the state, vendors and bond markets use to see whether a local government is solvent and whether its books reconcile.
The Cato audit found that the 2017 Annual Financial Report was filed in August 2022, more than four years after it was due. The reports for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 were not filed at all as of November 6, 2025, when auditors closed their fieldwork.
The audit’s core finding
The Office of the State Comptroller, known as OSC, summarized the problem in two sentences in the audit document.
“The Supervisor did not maintain complete, accurate and up-to-date accounting records and reports,” OSC wrote. The audit goes on to say, “The Supervisor assigned his duties of maintaining accounting records and preparing disbursements and financial reports to an appointed bookkeeper without providing adequate oversight.”
Under New York Town Law, the supervisor is the chief fiscal officer of the town. State guidance from the Comptroller’s office is clear that the supervisor can delegate the keeping of books to a bookkeeper, but cannot delegate responsibility for them.
That is the line OSC says was crossed in Cato.
What auditors actually found
The audit lists multiple specific deficiencies. They are not equally serious, but together they describe a town office where money came in and money went out without a paper trail tying back to the general ledger.
According to the audit:
- About $348,817 in receipts was not recorded in the accounting records during the audit period.
- About $744,572 in disbursements was not recorded in the accounting records during the audit period.
- Nine handwritten checks totaling $7,403 were issued but were not entered in the books.
- The bookkeeper prepared bank reconciliations that contained large unreconciled differences, and the differences were not investigated.
- One employee was overpaid by roughly $2,600 because the payroll certification process did not catch the error.
- The 2017 AFR was filed more than four years late.
- The 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 AFRs were not filed.
OSC made 10 recommendations to the town board and the supervisor. Under New York General Municipal Law section 35, the town board has 90 days from the audit’s release date to submit a written corrective action plan back to the Comptroller. That clock began ticking on March 27, 2026, which puts the deadline on or about June 25, 2026.
A change in leadership before the audit dropped
Cato voters made their own move on this before the report came out.
On November 4, 2025, two days before OSC closed its fieldwork, write-in candidate Jody Snyder, a former town clerk, defeated incumbent Town Supervisor Charles Ray. Snyder received 421 votes to Ray’s 165, according to public election results. Write-in candidates also swept the other four elected positions on the ballot, including town clerk, two town council seats and highway superintendent.
That means the audit was released to a town board that almost entirely turned over on January 1, 2026, and that the new supervisor was the one who inherited responsibility for filing the corrective action plan.
CNY Signal does not report that any individual identified in the audit committed any wrongdoing. The audit’s language refers to “the Supervisor” and “the bookkeeper” by title, not by name, and limits its findings to management failures.
The Cayuga County context
Cato is not the only town in the county to land in front of the Comptroller’s office in recent years. In 2024, the former supervisor of the Town of Throop, William Tarby, was convicted of stealing nearly $11,000 from the town over a three-year period, after a Comptroller audit identified missing funds and unauthorized credit card reimbursements.
The Village of Cato, which is a separate municipal entity inside the town, was the subject of a 2023 OSC audit on its water fund. A 2025 follow-up review, audit number 2023M-145-F, found the village had begun implementing corrective measures only after the Cayuga County Health Department forced the issue.
In other words, the supervisor’s audit released in March is the third Comptroller report in three years to flag fiscal management problems in or around Cato.
The state’s broader pattern
The Cato findings sit inside a much larger reporting backlog at the local government level in New York.
According to OSC’s most recent statistics, 381 New York local governments were classified as Annual Financial Report non-filers for fiscal year 2024. Of those, 126 were classified as persistent non-filers, meaning they had failed to submit reports for three or more years.
A separate Comptroller analysis found that 240 calendar-year municipalities, a category that includes towns, did not file their reports in time to receive a fiscal stress score for fiscal year 2024. That number is down from 264 the year before, but it is still nearly twice the figure from a decade ago. More than 482,000 New Yorkers live in jurisdictions that did not file on time.
The Comptroller’s office has said publicly that “lack of reporting is often an indicator of poor record-keeping and other troubling financial practices,” and that the absence of an AFR can let problems persist undetected for years before they require more serious intervention.
By that standard, Cato is a textbook case. Seven straight missed reports is not an accounting glitch. It is a long-running gap in the public record.
What this means for residents and vendors
The practical impact of the audit’s findings falls on three groups.
Taxpayers in Cato pay a town tax levy that funds general government, highways, fire protection and other services inside that $2.27 million appropriations figure. Without filed AFRs, those taxpayers have not had the standard year by year financial statement that lets them see whether reserves are growing or shrinking, whether debt service is being paid, or whether the town has run a structural deficit.
Vendors who do business with the town, from highway contractors to office suppliers, ordinarily look to a town’s filed financial reports to assess credit risk. Missing reports do not mean a town will not pay. They do mean a vendor has less information than usual to work with.
Grant recipients can be affected when a town applies for state or federal funds that require recent audited financial statements or AFRs. OSC has not publicly identified specific grants at risk to Cato, and the audit does not address that question.
What happens next
Under New York General Municipal Law, the town board must now produce a written corrective action plan and file it with the Comptroller’s office within 90 days of the audit’s release. The plan must address each of the 10 audit recommendations and lay out the steps the town will take to bring the books and the reports current.
Once the plan is filed, OSC typically conducts follow-up reviews on a delayed schedule, usually a year or more later, to confirm whether the recommendations have actually been implemented. That is what happened in the Village of Cato case, where a 2023 audit was followed by a 2025 follow-up review.
Residents who want to read the audit can find it on the Comptroller’s website at osc.ny.gov, under audit number 2025M-141. The Comptroller’s Division of Local Government and School Accountability accepts public inquiries at (518) 474-4037.
Town board meetings in Cato are held at the town offices at 11320 Short Cut Road and are open to the public under New York’s Open Meetings Law. Any resident can address the board during the public comment period and ask, on the record, what the new corrective action plan looks like and when the missing AFRs will be filed.
What this audit is not
The audit does not allege fraud, theft, or criminal conduct. It is a management audit. What it documents is that the town’s books did not match its bank activity, the state did not get the reports it is owed by law, and the supervisor did not provide oversight of the bookkeeper doing the work.
The town board has 90 days from March 27, 2026 to file a corrective action plan with OSC. The plan, when filed, lands on osc.ny.gov under audit number 2025M-141. The next public meeting where Cato residents can ask the board what is in that plan is at 11320 Short Cut Road in Cato.
