A North Carolina Town of 1,400 Can't Balance Its Checkbook
Summary
North Carolina's state auditor found the Town of Robbins let a forged $3,570 check go undetected for roughly two years, shredded voided checks in violation of public records law, and hasn't finished a financial audit in three years -- while it is in the middle of a water system improvement project costing more than $4 million.
A forged check nobody caught for two years
OSA's testing of Robbins' bank reconciliations turned up four dollar-denominated errors the Town's own books never flagged, totaling $89,348.34: a $3,570 forged check cashed in 2023⧉ that sat undetected until OSA found it in July 2025 (the Town filed a police report weeks later); five checks worth $4,645.65 that were cashed even though the Town's own register recorded them as voided (one vendor has since refunded $1,145.65 of it); a $15,440 invoice the Town paid twice, three weeks apart, in late 2024; and a $65,692.69 check written against an account that didn't have the money to cover it, which bounced and had to be repaid the following month with fees attached. The Town has hired an outside vendor, Southern Software, to catch up on bank reconciliations that as of February 2026 were still only current through January 2024 -- a year behind.
The records needed to check the checks were shredded
The forged check wasn't an isolated find. OSA tested a sequential run of 3,399 check numbers and discovered 153 were missing from the register entirely -- 21 of which had actually been cashed -- while 5 more checks the Town's records marked as voided had also been cashed. When OSA asked for images to sort out what really happened to these checks, the Town could not produce them for 137 of the voided-or-missing checks, so their final status is simply unknown. The reason: a former Finance Officer told the Town, in a message later shared with OSA, that voided checks were shredded 'for a while' -- destroying the paper trail that would let anyone tell an honest mistake from a second forgery. North Carolina's Public Records Act requires local governments to retain financial records like check registers for at least three years, specifically so that audits or investigations like this one can be conducted; OSA estimates 135 of the 137 unverifiable checks fall inside that legally protected window.
View data as table
| Check numbers tested (sequential sample) | 3,399 | Range #129292-#132690 |
|---|---|---|
| Missing from the register entirely | 153 | 21 of these missing checks had actually been cashed |
| Recorded as voided but cashed anyway | 5 | Out of 96 checks recorded as voided in that same sample |
| Final status unverifiable | 137 | The Town could not produce images for these voided-or-missing checks, so OSA could not confirm what happened to them |
The Town also stopped telling the state about its own unclaimed checks
Under North Carolina's Unclaimed Property Act, a government check that goes uncashed for more than a year is presumed abandoned, and the issuing government must report and remit it to the State Treasurer every November. OSA found 37 Robbins checks worth $76,464.28 had gone uncashed for over a year as of June 30, 2025. When OSA first raised it, Town officials said they had been filing that report annually -- but the Town Manager later emailed OSA to admit the FY2024 unclaimed-property report was never actually submitted, because the Town's bank reconciliation wasn't complete enough to produce it. Because the Town's own recordkeeping is unreliable, OSA couldn't even confirm that all 37 checks are genuinely outstanding rather than voided or reissued checks that were never properly logged as such.
Three years behind on audits, mid-way through a $4 million project
State law requires every North Carolina local government to have its books audited as soon as possible after each fiscal year closes. As of February 2026, Robbins had not completed audited financial statements for fiscal years 2022, 2023, or 2024 -- three years running. That's not a paperwork technicality: under N.C.G.S. § 159-34⧉, the state's Local Government Commission can withhold a delinquent town's sales tax distributions until it comes into compliance, cutting off a small town's own revenue as leverage to force the audits through. The Town has since contracted an outside firm, Mauldin & Jenkins, to complete the overdue FY2022 audit and enrolled in a state-run mentoring program for municipal finance staff -- moves OSA's report doesn't dispute, but which hadn't produced a single finished audit by the report's release.
The same report notes Robbins is mid-construction on a water system upgrade costing over $4 million -- a project roughly 45 times the size of the flagged Finding 1 errors, and one this town of under 1,400 residents, where those errors alone work out to about $64 for every resident, will have to account for with the same controls OSA just found broken.
Robbins' Town Manager, in a written response included with the report, pushed back on parts of it: he said the finance officer specifically hired to catch up bank reconciliations turned out to have a skillset that didn't match their stated experience, leading management to accept their resignation; he said a $11,600 overpayment had already been flagged internally and the Finance Officer told not to mail it, but it was mistakenly reissued after that officer left; and he specifically disputed the petty-cash finding, saying the only check the current administration ever wrote to 'Cash' funded a police narcotics sting that recovered hundreds of pounds of drugs, with records provided to OSA. He did not dispute the forged check, the shredded records, the missing audits, or the unfiled unclaimed-property report.
- A forged check sat uncaught for about two years, and the state auditor found it, not the Town. Robbins hadn't reconciled its own bank accounts closely enough to notice -- reconciliations were still a year behind as of February 2026.
- The evidence needed to sort fraud from error was destroyed. A former Finance Officer shredded voided checks, leaving 137 checks -- most inside the legally required three-year retention window -- with no way to confirm what actually happened to them.
- The Town is mid-way through a $4 million water project with three years of audits still undone. State law gives North Carolina's Local Government Commission the power to withhold Robbins' own sales tax revenue until the books catch up.
Figures are drawn from the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor's May 13, 2026 Rapid Response Special Report on the Town of Robbins, read in full via direct PDF fetch, including the Town's complete written response. An archive.org Save Page Now capture of the direct auditor.nc.gov URL succeeded and is attached alongside the direct link, which serves the PDF inline. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary document alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
The $89,348.34 Finding 1 total, the $63.91-per-resident figure, the 4.0% unverifiable-check share, the 26-checks-cashed-despite-being-marked-missing-or-voided figure, and the 17.9% dual-signature violation rate are this outlet's own arithmetic on the report's own itemized figures (methods and caveats in analysis.json). The report itself does not total, average, or convert any of these figures to a percentage.
Sources(2) ▾
- North Carolina Office of the State Auditor, Rapid Response Division (State Auditor Dave Boliek), Rapid Response Special Report: Town of Robbins (2026-05-13) — The primary document: OSA's Rapid Response Special Report on the Town of Robbins (Moore County, NC), initiated from an OSA Tipline referral and covering fiscal years 2021-2025. Source for all eight findings -- the undetected $3,570 forged check and other Finding 1 bank-reconciliation errors (p.1, p.4); the FY2020 purchasing-policy corrective action that was never implemented and the $15,440 duplicate payment (p.5-6); the 153 missing check numbers and improperly shredded voided checks (p.6-7); the accounts-payable register mismatches (p.8); the non-sequential check numbers (p.9); the dual-signature violations (p.10); the $76,464.28 in unreported unclaimed checks (p.11-12); the three-years-delinquent audits (p.12-13); the petty-cash and vendor-address issues (p.13); the Town's background, staffing turnover, and remediation steps (p.2-3); the Closing Remarks noting the Town's over-$4-million water system improvement project (p.14); and the Town Manager's full written response of April 5, 2026 (p.15-17). auditor.nc.gov · original document
- North Carolina Office of the State Auditor, State Auditor's Tipline (2026-07-19) — Confirms the OSA Tipline's current phone number (1-800-730-8477), web form (https://ncauditor.my.site.com/), email (Tipline@ncauditor.gov), and mailing address -- the same tipline through which OSA states it received the referral that triggered this Rapid Response review. auditor.nc.gov · original document
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The North Carolina Office of the State Auditor⧉ -- the state's independent fiscal watchdog, which dispatched its Rapid Response Division here after a tip to its fraud hotline -- found that the Town of Robbins, a Moore County town of about 1,398 people, let a forged $3,570 check go undetected for roughly two years, improperly shredded voided checks in violation of North Carolina's public records law, and has not completed a financial audit since fiscal year 2021. The review, covering FY2021-2025, lands while the Town is in the middle of a water system improvement project costing over $4 million -- money it will have to account for using the same bookkeeping the state auditor just found broken.