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In the professional disciplines of enterprise IT infrastructure and financial auditing, discovering widespread systemic failure triggers an absolute, non-negotiable mandate: the crisis must be traced back to its root origin.
Information technology (IT) and financial standards demand that issues as extensive as that of Marion be investigated until the foundational cause is exposed, not artificially stopped simply because administrators do not want auditors going back any further. Or masked by grouping together figures to effectively cook the books without actually seeing what’s in the books beyond the scope of a team contracted by the city to fix it.
Yet, in Marion, Ohio, this critical professional standard appears to have been deliberately violated to protect a shadow system.
The total, documented bill for the predictable IT and financial collapse in Marion stands at a staggering $2,936,447.93. This figure combines a massive $2.5 million un-reconciled digital black hole with exactly $436,447.93 in emergency penalties, legal retainers, and consultant fees. This is likely not the final cost, which continues to grow.
When a municipal administration chooses to run a multi-million-dollar enterprise without functioning software controls, the citizens are forced to absorb the mismanagement of funds and pay the resulting fines.
But a rigorous, fact-based investigative analysis of the raw data reveals that this was not a passive failure. The true scandal surrounding Marion’s collapse appears to be a highly orchestrated, legally perilous, and coordinated cover-up designed to hide a decade of systemic exploitation—a cover-up executed by the Schertzer administration and explicitly enabled by the legislative oversight of the Marion City Council, particularly during Jason Schaber’s tenure as Finance Chairman.
In municipal finance, enterprise software safety controls are legally mandated safeguards.
The deliberate decision to leave critical security and reconciliation and other modules turned off constitutes an improper, illegal use of taxpayer funds and a direct breach of fiduciary duty.
Since resuming active media operations in late December 2024, Marion Watch has aggressively pursued the municipal IT failures dating back to 2010. What began as rumors of basic credential sharing, attempted reporting of our suspicions in 2016 following a theft incident which raised many red flags for IT, law enforcement, and financial professionals on our teams, evolved into documented reporting between 2018 and 2020. In 2025, our investigation has uncovered council minutes, official State of Ohio audit records, internal technical documents, and eyewitness accounts that prove a chilling reality: when outside investigators finally arrived to untangle the financial mess, the Schertzer administration actively and intentionally blinded them to conceal the pre-2020 timeline.
Members of the former Schertzer administration, along with holdovers who remained in power until recently, have long relied on a highly convenient defense barrier. They insist that reopening closed audits is impossible. This talking point has been repeated at the legislative table during countless council meetings and across public interactions to shut down further inquiries.
However, as a matter of established law, this is categorically false.
A closed municipal audit is not a permanent shield, especially if the original audit was secured through concealment, digital manipulation, or the intentional withholding of records. Both Ohio and federal laws contain strict provisions designed to pierce these exact types of cover-ups:
- The Ohio Auditor of State’s Authority (ORC Chapter 117): Under the Ohio Revised Code, the Auditor of State is not bound by a closed audit if new evidence reveals that public money was illegally expended, converted, or misappropriated. If evidence shows that local officials intentionally restricted external auditors, deactivated tracking modules, or provided corrupted data, the State Auditor has the statutory authority to launch a “Special Audit” to forensically reconstruct the timeline and issue formal Findings for Recovery.
- Fraud and the Tolling of the Statute of Limitations: In Ohio, crimes involving public corruption, theft in office (ORC 2921.41), and the tampering with public records do not simply vanish because a specific fiscal year was signed off on. When deliberate concealment or fraud is involved, or suspected, the statute of limitations is generally “tolled”—meaning the legal clock is paused until the deception is actually discovered by authorities.
- Federal Oversight and Mandated Reconstruction: Because Marion’s financial collapse resulted in massive IRS penalties and involved funds tied to federal grants (such as transit and infrastructure), federal standards apply. Under the Single Audit Act and federal oversight guidelines, if it is discovered that a municipality made material misrepresentations or actively interfered with an auditor’s ability to review historical data, federal agencies possess sweeping authority. They can mandate an immediate forensic reconstruction of past books, claw back federal funds, and initiate their own investigations regardless of what the local or state audits previously concluded.
The refusal to go backward into the pre-2020 archives is not a matter of Ohio or federal law. It is a matter of self-preservation. When the system is broken on purpose, closing the book does not erase the crime; it simply delays the accountability.
In the event of a suspected breach of law regarding municipal finances or the deliberate manipulation of enterprise information technology controls, statutory provisions and standard investigative protocols absolutely allow for historical audits to be reopened and scrutinized.
The refusal to go backward is not a matter of law; it is a matter of self-preservation.
These same holdovers have consistently barked loudly whenever anyone attempted to pull the thread on issues occurring prior to 2020. They aggressively pushed to keep the focus narrow, attempting to quarantine the timeline and dismiss the crisis as a recent “software glitch, incompetence,” or whatever other excuses serve the political purpose at the time.
The fact is that anyone who disagrees and attempts to ensure the timeline is expanded pre-2020 is attacked or discredited. We’ve seen this time and time again, and experienced it during our own involvement.
But independent investigations have more than proven that severe technological and financial rot existed long before 2020—a reality that has now been definitively confirmed, echoed by the explosive findings of Veritas Solutions Group.
The administration did not suddenly lose control of the system in 2019; they had been operating a shadow system for a decade, and they explicitly forbade external consultants from looking at the proof, and while discussions regarding a full financial audit were discussed, Veritas was never afforded the opportunity to do the audit, and look before 2020.
In the midst of the escalating financial panic, the Schertzer administration funneled $128,450 to Veritas Solutions Group to untangle a mess including the $2.5 million cross-fund discrepancy and reconciliation issues. What the consultants discovered during their forensic review exposed a labyrinth of legal breaches and technological ruin and confirms Marion Watch’s external IT audit analysis, which escalated in 2018.
Veritas exposed that the New World software’s dedicated bank reconciliation module was never utilized or installed correctly along with many other modules not installed or misconfigured.
A municipal government deliberately chose not to balance its checkbook using the software’s built-in legally mandated safeguards, and relied on a series of “secret workarounds,” effectively wasting the taxpayer money used to purchase that very capability and violating Ohio statutory reconciliation laws.
Like Marion Watch, the deeper Veritas dug, the worse the digital rot became. The consulting firm encountered deeply corrupted data across the municipal network. To even begin making sense of the fractured ledgers, Veritas had to execute thousands of manual corrections just to stabilize the reporting.
Furthermore, they identified that severe root issues existed. An example is within the city’s utility billing dating back at least a year and a half prior to their review, and “phantom data” when running reports with an unknown cause or origin.
The most explosive revelation—and the smoking gun of a coordinated cover-up—lies in what Veritas was not allowed to do. When the consulting firm recognized the deeply corrupted data and attempted to execute a standard historical dive into the pre-2019 and 2020 archives to find the genesis of the failure, city leadership stepped in.
Official council minutes explicitly and repeatedly document that the administration intentionally restricted Veritas from reviewing historical data. This was not a matter of limited resources or standard contract scoping; it was a deliberate digital quarantine designed to conceal the origins of the crisis.
Restricting external financial investigators from accessing historical public data is a severe breach of auditing compliance laws. Ultimately, this suppression led to a complete halt in the contract. Veritas took the extraordinary step of firing the City of Marion as a client, walking away from a highly lucrative public contract because the Schertzer administration outright refused to let them uncover the historical truth.
Why were city insiders so desperate to keep Veritas out of the pre-2020 archives? Because a full forensic timeline would destroy the narrative of a recent “software glitch” or isolated mistake, exposing a multi-year timeline of intentional sabotage.
This is exactly why the former administration blocked Veritas from executing a full financial audit, and it reveals exactly why lingering holdovers from that era continue to aggressively fight against a full forensic IT audit today. However, they are now fighting a losing battle against a current administration that actually wants the books opened. Today, the push for a comprehensive forensic audit is supported by key figures who recognize the gravity of the situation, including City Treasurer Twila Laing, Councilwoman Pam Larkin, and many other quieter voices within City Hall who now understand the severity of the breaches.
Crucially, this effort is being spearheaded by City Councilman and IT Oversight Committee Chairman Ralph Smith. As a U.S. Army veteran who served as an IT expert during the Vietnam War and possesses deep, practical proficiency in software and coding, Smith knows exactly what a secure system looks like—and he knows what the requested logs are going to reveal.
Both a financial and IT forensic audit could have been more than sufficiently justified as early as 2012 had the Schertzer administration’s severe IT and financial control issues been publicly known. For any competent IT or financial professional who understands how these enterprise systems operate, the red flags were glaring from 2009 forward.
If permitted to look at the historical data, auditors would have immediately found the 22 citations issued by the Auditor of State right after the software’s 2009 installation. They would have uncovered documented theft, intentionally disabled auditing modules, and chronic, ongoing issues with reconciliation. They would have unraveled a root cause built on grave violations of fundamental IT and financial standards. In fact, Veritas themselves noted the presence of pre-2020 reconciliation issues and deeply corrupted data in official council summaries, but their hands were tied by the administration before they could trace the rot to its source.
If external investigators had not been blinded, they would have uncovered how this cultivated digital blindness allowed the city to hide million-dollar deficits in 2011 and beyond. This orchestrated lack of visibility allowed the administration to effectively dodge a mandatory state “Fiscal Caution” takeover just in time for Jason Schaber and a complicit city council to push through a $3.5 million aquatic center override while the city’s finances were in drastic decline.
To execute and maintain this coordinated cover-up, the Schertzer administration weaponized its IT infrastructure while the legislative branch protected the blindfold. Tellingly, it was during this exact period that the IT Oversight Committee was officially legislated out of existence, stripping away the exact body designed to catch these systemic manipulations.
Today, official documentation, eyewitness accounts, and screenshots confirm the discovery of inappropriate, elevated access within the New World financial system. Individuals within the government who possessed absolutely no legitimate business need for such clearance—including permissions granted to council members and others—were operating with “super-user” administrative rights.
Providing unauthorized personnel with super-user access is the deliberate destruction of the segregation of duties. This destruction was not an isolated glitch; it was a proven, historical playbook of software manipulation designed to obliterate oversight.
The abuse is so widespread that the true number of people who have possessed this inappropriate access, including elevated access since the software was installed remains unknown. To finally answer this, Chairman Ralph Smith formally sent a request for the raw IT logs and receipts on our behalf. After waiting months for this information, that request has recently been approved by the Law Director and sent to the appropriate department.
Every single red flag required to justify a full forensic audit in both the financial and IT sectors for abuse and potential fraud was met many years ago. They are only now coming to light.
Official archives document a terrifying pattern of legally mandated controls being systematically disabled and include, for example:
- Unrestricted Budget Overrides (The “Blank Check”): The deliberate deactivation of the “GL Override” predicted by Marion Watch (budgetary hard stops) allowed department heads to completely bypass oversight and legally required approvals, spending millions beyond their authorized appropriations. During his tenure as Finance Chairman, Jason Schaber and others had direct access to data warning of this vulnerability, yet the Finance Committee allowed entire fiscal years to operate illegally with massive negative line items.
- The Utility Theft Cover (2011–2014): When a former utility supervisor stole over $34,000 by manually adjusting customer bills to zero, the fraud was facilitated by disabled Approval Workflows and deactivated Audit Trails that should have immediately flagged the 71 fraudulent adjustments.
- The 2020 ACH “Ghost Employee”: When a dormant “Ghost Employee” was mysteriously inserted into a live Magic-Wrighter payroll batch, investigations were deliberately blinded because the system’s critical “Audit Trackers” had been intentionally turned off, creating an audit gap that provided plausible deniability. The statement given by a former Landon administration employee is below.
- The $154,000 “Typo” and Dormant Validation: Critical safety sensors like Vendor Validation and Input Masks were disabled, allowing federal tax payments to be mistakenly routed to the State of Ohio and not caught for at least six consecutive months without triggering a single “mismatch” system alarm.
Because the system was allowed to operate blindly under the control of unauthorized insiders and intentionally disabled software trackers and safety controls, the city lost its ability to legally secure its own cash reserves, and lost its bond rating amongst other serious consequences leading to the Ohio Auditor of State placing Marion in Fiscal Caution.
While gathering documents for this article, another surprise emerged: the existence of “ghost transactions.”
This culture of zero oversight culminated in October 2022, when the Schertzer administration unilaterally wired $500,000 out of an FC Bank account directly into a Union Bank Intrafi money market account. Official council summaries from March 27, 2023, and July 10, 2023, reveal this transfer was executed completely outside of standard legislative oversight, funneling public money into a significantly lower-yielding account.
This maneuver bypassed legally mandated investment protocols, bleeding the city of thousands of dollars in lost yield.
The breakdown of oversight did not stop at reckless transfers; it actively enabled further unauthorized and illegal money dealings within the Auditor’s office. According to public reports and council records, Auditor Miranda Meginness admitted to fraud and misappropriation of funds, specifically acknowledging that she deliberately miscoded an expense transaction with the intent to conceal a payment to the IRS. By utilizing “false documentation” within the system, Meginness effectively weaponized the compromised software to mask the transaction.
Additionally, the Auditor’s office paid a $58,000 bill entirely without council appropriation, prompting the City Council’s Finance Committee to unanimously advance an ordinance formally accusing the office of “misfeasance, malfeasance, and or nonfeasance.” These allegations also extended to Deputy Auditor Marden Watts, who, according to council testimony, actively disbursed funds without authorization and oversaw subsequent payroll failures that derailed city operations.
This hoarding of controls and weaponization of the software had a direct target. For years, the Schertzer administration publicly scapegoated the Auditor’s office, under the leadership of Robert Landon III, for the financial chaos. While Mr. Landon has admitted to making a mistake, it was an error that functioning, correctly configured enterprise software would have automatically caught and prevented.
However, official documentation proves that the Auditor’s office was actively “boxed out” of the software entirely. Landon was explicitly denied access to the reconciliation methods, which were hoarded by former administration insiders who outright refused to share them. Officials within the current Collins administration have advised that the Ohio Auditor of State is now officially aware of this fact.
In an attempt to review the system post-Landon, an “IT General Controls / System Analysis” audit was conducted.
There is a massive difference between a general system analysis and a full forensic IT audit. A general controls audit merely scratches the surface, relying on the software’s own built-in logs and active settings to evaluate if processes are working. A full forensic IT audit, however, assumes the system is compromised. It bypasses the application entirely to extract raw, underlying server data, painstakingly reconstructing deleted tables and manipulated timelines.
Because we already know for a fact that critical audit trails and security settings within the New World software were deliberately turned off or misconfigured, the general controls audit is inherently inaccurate. It was reviewing a manipulated system using the very tracking tools from the compromised system.
This engineered digital lockout, which actively prevented an elected official from performing his statutory duties, constitutes another severe legal breach. The financial crisis was the direct result of a shadow system designed to block standard oversight. This leaves the Schertzer administration, alongside the Information Technology department, Auditor Kelly Carr, and Deputy Auditor Cathy Chaffin, basically to blame for orchestrating the sabotage—while the City Council and Finance Chairman Jason Schaber dutifully legislated the historical blackout.
The September 2020 Trial Balance: Mathematical Proof of Pre-Existing Systemic Failure
The September 30, 2020, City of Marion Trial Balance provides direct mathematical proof that the municipality’s financial collapse is a long-standing systemic failure, rather than a recent software glitch. By definition, a trial balance ledger must balance to zero; a discrepancy signifies a fundamental failure to reconcile the city’s internal general ledger with its actual cash position. The September 2020 report demonstrates a complete breakdown of this required accounting principle.
The ledger explicitly documents a massive $16,192,124.15 un-reconciled difference between the “Net Cash” ending balance and the “Treasurer’s Report”. This gap confirms that the city’s books were actively operating out of balance. The summary cash accounts also expose a highly irregular structure where massive negative balances were offset by the general cash account. Specifically, the Fahey Cash General account held a balance of $122,426,047.06 to cover an enormous negative balance of ($104,642,158.06) in the Fahey Cash Payroll account. This structure points directly to a problematic cash-pooling system and severe structural accounting errors.
Beyond the summary accounts, the trial balance reveals that numerous critical city funds were operating with massive negative ending balances, meaning expenditures far exceeded available revenues and assets. Specific operational deficits included:
- Marion Area Transit (Fund 501): ($11,788,021.83)
- Sanitary Sewer (Fund 502): ($4,935,735.86)
- Storm Sewer (Fund 504): ($4,308,404.15)
- General Fund (Fund 101): ($4,150,265.94)
The 2020 document is heavily laden with “P/Y Fund Equity Adjustments,” which are material corrections made to the starting balances carried over from previous years. This indicator explicitly proves that the financial records preceding 2020 contained substantial errors requiring manual adjustment to establish the 2020 reporting. An enterprise IT and financial infrastructure that relies on massive prior-year adjustments to function is evidence of an environment operating without controls. The un-reconciled millions, the negative line items, and the prior-year adjustments confirm that the technological and financial breakdown was deeply entrenched and festering long before the 2020 reporting period.
The ultimate mathematical outcome of this illegal software ecosystem is a catastrophic cascade of missing funds, mismanaged capital, and crippling penalties. Because the reporting modules were corrupted and critical workflows were deliberately withheld, the software’s manipulated configuration caused the city to fail at filing standard federal paperwork. This resulted in a devastating $196,972.39 IRS penalty for the year 2020 (which was eventually mostly abated after the fact) and a second IRS penalty of $70,083.62 for 2022 and 2023.
To fight the massive federal fines they themselves triggered, the administration funneled another $35,000 to outside legal counsel, while the broken workflows quietly generated a steady bleed of other penalties and late fees.
Combine the $2.5 million un-reconciled discrepancy with these specific emergency fines, legal fees, and the $128,450 Veritas payout, and the $2,936,447.93 total represents pure, incinerated taxpayer wealth. Crucially, this nearly $3 million disaster sits entirely separate from the $4,000,000 lame-duck “shopping spree” the Schertzer administration conducted at the end of their reign—a spending spree they executed knowing the incoming Collins administration would be forced to foot the bill.
Currently, discussions of misfeasance—the improper performance of a lawful act—and holding the responsible parties accountable are circulating heavily among current City Hall administrators.
But true accountability and any subsequent investigations must pierce the veil of this coordinated cover-up. Documentary evidence proves that from 2020 onward, the Auditor’s office was the victim of an engineered digital lockout. This makes it unequivocally clear that the Schertzer administration—in tandem with Carr and Chaffin’s management of the Auditor’s workflows and the sheer complacency of the Information Technology department—is squarely to blame. Under the law, those who knew about the sabotage and said nothing are just as culpable as those who pulled the levers.
By restricting external consultants from the pre-2020 archives to conceal historical corrupted data, hoarding workflows, wielding inappropriate super-user access, sharing passwords, and authorizing illegal unappropriated spending, former city leadership actively cultivated and protected this digital blind spot.
The nearly $3 million financial outcome of the New World software failure is not a glitch. It is the story of an administration that orchestrated a cover-up to protect unauthorized access, a complicit city council that ignored decades of audit warnings, or were misled by conspirators, and a deliberate, calculated choice to bleed the taxpayer dry rather than let investigators finally turn the lights on.