Hard drives from Sheriff's Office deemed suspicious

At least two computer hard drives examined in a probe of the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office appear to have been recently replaced or tampered with, according to the City Controller's Office.

As many as 10 other computer drives show signs of similar problems, but technical consultants need to examine their data more closely before reaching a conclusion on whether they've been improperly handled, according to Deputy City Controller Harvey Rice.

Investigators working for the Controller's Office have taken hard-drive images from about 70 computers in the Sheriff's Office, Rice said. Some of the drives were unusually clean, he said, free of the dust that would normally be found in computers used for months or years.

Rice's boss, Controller Alan Butkovitz, said he intends to refer the issue to Louis Pichini, a former federal prosecutor named this week to head a forensic-auditing team from Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, hired to analyze all the sheriff's financial records.

The Controller's Office spent 18 months trying to audit three of the sheriff's custodial accounts, used to receive and disburse millions of dollars from the sheriff's real-estate sales.

Butkovitz threw up his hands in late October and began planning for the more extensive forensic audit. He complained that even after 18 months, the office of former Sheriff John Green had provided the controller with less than a quarter of the bank records and other material needed to reconcile its accounts.

"Their continued refusal to provide requested documents and information, coupled with poor control procedures that provide ample opportunity to misappropriate and conceal a theft of funds . . . makes the Sheriff's Office highly at risk for fraudulent activity," the Controller's Office said in its October report.

While setting up the process that led to a six-month, $462,000 contract for the probe by the Deloitte firm, Butkovitz hired a Conshohocken firm, Lexington Technology Auditing Inc., to secure and image computers in the Sheriff's Office and at offices of a contractor involved in sheriff sales, Reach Communications.

Rice said the two hard drives that appeared suspiciously clean were both in machines at the Sheriff's Office.

Green resigned at the end of December, and the outgoing governor, Ed Rendell, named Green's top deputy, Barbara Deeley, as acting sheriff.

At the end of her first week, Deeley removed four top-level aides and severed the office's relationship with Reach Communications.

Her chief deputy, Joseph Vignola, said yesterday that he was aware of the consultants' concerns about the integrity of several computer drives but did not know which of the sheriff's employees had access to those computers.

Because of his own concerns about possible tampering with the sheriff's records, Vignola said, he had asked the city's Department of Technology to take custody of seven computers in the Sheriff's Office, used by three employees of Reach Communications and the four aides who were dismissed or transferred by Deeley in early January.

"We changed the locks and secured the offices, but I didn't know who had keys to what, so I asked the managing director to come over and disconnect . . . those seven computers," Vignola said. "We turned them over to the Department of Technology for secure storage. . . . I didn't want those machines to walk."

Vignola said he subsequently learned that the computers had been transferred to the custody of the city's inspector general, Amy Kurland.