FY25 Audit Update: Closer Review of Preliminary Reconciliation Reveals Apparent BOS Budget Overages

The numbers are still being labeled as “preliminary,” but a closer review of a recently released document prepared to reconcile Wilton’s Fiscal Year 2025 finances is drawing new scrutiny.

Board of Finance members now contend the preliminary reconciliation was initially presented as a $662,148 operating surplus for the Board of Selectmen, but it appears to reflect over $310,000 in FY25 operating budget overages.

BOF officials said the apparent overages are also raising governance concerns about whether spending was approved through the process required by the Town Charter.

Questions about the reconciliation first surfaced publicly at last Tuesday’s (July 14) Board of Finance meeting, where members expressed concern not only about the town’s months-long effort to complete the FY25 reconciliation, but also whether the preliminary figures themselves could be relied upon.

“I don’t trust this information … I don’t have any faith in it,” Board of Finance member Prasad Iyer said after questioning inconsistencies between previous updates on the reconciliation’s progress as well as problems that arose during ongoing complications in the Town’s migration from one financial software system to another.

Board of Finance Chair Tim Birch responded, “I don’t disagree with you.”

As board members continued reviewing the preliminary reconciliation, Board of Finance member Kim Healy said she identified what she believes is a significant problem with how the Board of Selectmen’s operating budget was calculated.

The reconciliation document, prepared by consultant Joseph Centofanti, was publicly presented for the first time by Chief Financial Officer Dawn Savo at the Monday, July 6 Board of Selectmen meeting. At the time, BOS members remarked on how it showed the BOS FY’25 operating budget had finished the year under budget by approximately $662,000.

Healy contends that the reconciliation improperly included the Town’s Charter Authority reserve of $1,275,371 in that calculation. Removing that reserve, she said, appears to change what had been presented as a budget surplus into operating budget overages totaling $310,804.

The apparent overages have prompted broader questions about whether the spending above adopted budget appropriations was approved through the process required under the Town Charter and, according to Birch, Connecticut law.

“We are concerned about the expense overruns,” Birch said Monday in an email to GOOD Morning Wilton.

“We are also concerned because our interpretation of the state statute is that increased appropriations to a department require BOF consent. That did not occur nor were we informed of the overruns,” Birch said.

Birch said the issue is particularly troubling because the Board of Finance relied on the town’s financial information while developing subsequent budgets.

“It is very unfortunate for those of us who attempt to prepare realistic budgets and resultant mill rates to not have accurate information when we are in the budget process,” he said.

Healy, who was serving on the Board of Selectmen during FY25, told GMW she found the revelation problematic.

“This is the first time that we’re seeing any of this information,” she said.

“You’re not allowed to run over budget in governmental accounting without coming to the CFO-slash-Board of Selectmen to get more funding,” Healy said.

Under Wilton’s Charter, departments needing additional funding must request it from the Board of Selectmen. If the Board of Selectmen agrees, it may then request a supplemental appropriation from the Board of Finance. Depending on the amount, additional Town Meeting approval may also be required. Birch said the Board of Finance also believes Connecticut law requires its approval before departmental appropriations are increased.

“We understand, obviously, that things happen and we make adjustments as needed, [but] each department that runs over should come forward with a very detailed explanation and possibly details to support why they ran over,” she said. “They’re not supposed to run over.”

Under Whose Authority?

This, in turn, raises new questions of how and when additional spending was approved in certain categories — and by whom, including whether it was authorized by First Selectman Toni Boucher, former Town Administrator Matt Knickerbocker or in some other way.

More than one department area went significantly over its budget for FY25, including Town Counsel, which went $125,337 above its $211,000 approved budget, and Information Services, which went $123,375 above its $919,754 approved budget.

“These are significant overages,” Healy said, explaining that the BOS should have been notified about all of them as they occurred. She said some of them were brought to board’s attention and approved, including some public safety items, but others remain a mystery.

Along with the inclusion of the Charter Authority reserve that Healy believes should not have been part of the operating budget calculation, she raised other questions about Centofanti’s reconciliation document, including what she believes is an error involving Debt Service and the reporting of a $302,419 overage.

By including the Charter Authority reserve and subtracting the Debt Service, Centofanti’s document reported that the town was $662,148 under budget — a statement Savo implicitly supported when she presented the document, first to the BOS on July 6 and then the BOF July 14, though both times she qualified the presentation by saying she couldn’t answer any specific questions about the numbers, as she hadn’t prepared them herself.

“I think Dawn Savo, wherever she came from, they use Charter Authority to kind of cover things, but we don’t do that … I think we were pretty clear the other day that Charter Authority is not a piggy bank,” Healy told GMW. “Charter’s not meant to just cover expenses.”

Questioning the Consultant

Centofanti was originally hired as an interim CFO prior to Savo’s arrival in December 2025; he has continued on as a paid consultant assigned to reconciling FY25 in preparation for the annual audit. He has billed the town for well over $200,000 to date for his work, much to the consternation of Healy and other town officials.

BOF and BOS officials have expressed frustration with Centofanti’s failure to communicate directly with them, despite explicit requests from Birch and others. Boucher and Savo have continued to defend Centofanti’s work and role, saying he wasn’t required to speak to any town officials and praising the work he did, despite numerous delays in getting it completed.

“Joe Centofanti, when he came to us, he promised it would be perfect,” Healy told GMW. “We were paying a ton of money and he was doing all this work for us.”

Healy said the bills for Centofanti, a consultant with PKF O’Connor Davies which charges $375 an hour for his services, are “ridiculous. There is no supporting documentation. I wouldn’t have paid one of those bills.”

“He promised when we got anything from him it would be audit ready,” she said, “and here we have two blatant questionable things on this report.”

Another item she expressed concern about was Centofanti’s failure to detail a line item listing a $300,000 deficit for HR Reserve. This, she said, involves money that should have properly been placed in other accounts.

“That needs to happen … Why we were given a report with this not done, I don’t know,” she said. “It should have been done … Does Joe not know what’s in that number?”

Who’s Responsible?

As the town has struggled for more than a year to get its Finance Department back on track, much blame has been placed on the failure for the town to smoothly move from the New World software accounting system to a different system called Munis.

Boucher has also pointed to various staff members who have since departed, including Knickerbocker and former CFO Dawn Norton.

“You cannot put this on Dawn Norton,” Healy said of the FY25 overages in the various departments. “You just can’t. Yes, the Finance Department is supposed to stop overspending, but do we know if her boss told her to make these transactions? … I can’t speculate. I don’t know, but we need to go back and get that answer.”

After Norton’s departure, though it wasn’t specifically in his purview, former controller Anthony DeFelice brought the BOS’s attention to payments that were authorized on a school tile project by Frank Smeriglio, the former director of the Department of Public Works without seeking approval from the BOS. When news came to light of that approval, rather than chastising Smeriglio for taking actions that were not authorized and technically illegal, Boucher and Second Selectman Ross Tartell instead praised him for his initiative.

“They’re all gone so we’re never gonna know, but we do have to correct it going forward,” Healy said.

Prior to Norton’s departure, and on the heels of various finance and management issues that had impacted Town Hall, members of the BOF — including current Selectman Matt Raimondi, who was then chair of the BOF — had initiated the formation of a Process Review Committee. The purpose of the committee was, ultimately, to engage a reliable outside firm to conduct a managerial audit of operations and processes in Town Hall. 

While it met once to discuss hiring an outside firm, the committee was put on the shelf after the sudden and dramatic departure of Norton in August 2025.

Norton submitted her resignation after it became public that she was living full-time in Wyoming and had taken a job as the CFO for a small municipality there, still simultaneously continuing her supposedly full-time role as Wilton’s CFO. While Boucher or Knickerbocker said it had been done without their knowledge, Norton said that at least Knickerbocker had been aware.

Reviewing Processes

Ironically, both Boucher and Tartell have suggested that Centofanti himself, along with his firm, may be the best choices for conducting the mission of a town process review, though others have disagreed. At one time PKF O’Connor Davies had conducted Wilton’s audits, but a former iteration of the BOF and previous CFO both recommended not working with them anymore at that time.

While Healy does not expect to see the Process Review Committee reformed, she said that the town — beginning with the BOS — has to start asking hard questions and, ultimately, get some reliable safeguards in place to keep these things from happening going forward.

“What is the system you have in place that’s going to stop this … We have every right to know that there are systems in place that won’t allow this to happen in the future,” she said.

“These are extremely concerning numbers,” she said of the department overages.

More will be heard about these numbers in the coming days, as Healy said the BOS is going to have to approve them by law in order to, in essence, officially zero out all of the accounts. The BOS is meeting tonight, July 20, at 7 p.m. and may be discussing the matter.

Wilton is already significantly delayed in having its annual state audit done, having missed the June 30 deadline already, but the hope is it will be completed before the end of the summer. Once that is done, town officials will be taking a closer look at the numbers, exploring what may have happened to get these budget overages approved, and what Wilton can do going forward to make sure its financial house is in order.

“This has never happened in my experience, where overages happened long after the fact where there’s not a specific project or issue or billing or something significant that has happened that has created the need for the request,” Healy said. “This is just basically running departments without checks and balances to make sure they don’t run over budget.”

GMW reached out to Toni Boucher on Sunday, July 19 for comment but she did not respond in time for publication. on Monday evening, July 20.