Oct. 23--A south suburban village is suing two accounting firms, alleging the companies failed to detect that a former village clerk was stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in municipal funds for nearly a decade.
The village of Burnham filed the lawsuit Tuesday in Cook County Court against firms O'Neill and Gaspardo LLC in Mokena and The Walker Group.
Burnham officials said the village hired the firms to do annual audits of the town's books but allegedly did not detect repeated thefts by clerk Nancy Dobrowski, who held the clerk's office for more than three decades.
Representatives from either firm could not immediately be reached for comment.
Dobrowski, 71, faced federal charges of wire fraud and filing a false tax return in May 2014. Prosecutors said she altered the books to cover up her crimes and used the pilfered money to pay for gambling trips to Indiana. The amount of money Dobrowski stole equated to months of spending in the small village for its police department or garbage disposal, officials said at the time.
Dobrowski pleaded guilty and was given an 18-month prison sentence. She was ordered to pay full restitution and owes the Internal Revenue Service another $200,000. She is serving her sentence at a minimum security federal prison camp in West Virginia and is scheduled for release in February.
Burnham is being represented by attorney Devon Bruce, who also represented the city of Dixon in a similar lawsuit involving the massive embezzlement by former treasurer Rita Crundwell. In that case, Dixon officials agreed to a $40 million settlement of its lawsuit against the bank auditors, accusing them of not discovering Crundwell had stolen almost $54 million over 22 years.
"The Village of Burnham hired these accounting firms to perform the City audits and part of their job was to find any fraud or misstatement in the Village's finances," Bruce said in a statement. "These accounting firms failed to do their job, which allowed Nancy Dobrowski's theft to continue for years."
cdrhodes@tribpub.com
