Oklahoma Town of 673 Lost 31% of Its Spending to Fraud

A forensic audit⧉ by Oklahoma's State Auditor & Inspector -- the state's elected watchdog for public money, empowered by statute to investigate any city or town at its own governing board's request -- found that the Town of Washington, population 673, lost $1,022,412 to fraud or unauthorized spending between July 2020 and July 2024: about 31% of everything the Town spent, or roughly $1,519 for every resident.▸ Most of it moved through one desk: the Town's own clerk-treasurer, Susan Noel, whom the audit found personally misappropriated $676,368 using at least 19 vendors and financial platforms -- Bank of America credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, and an Amazon account that shipped 584 packages to her house and none to Town Hall.

Noel ran the Town's books for 17 years, from 2007 until her termination in July 2024, and was one of only two people -- alongside Town Administrator Paul Aday, who served 31 years -- authorized to sign a Town check between 2008 and 2024; no Board member ever held that authority.▸ For most of that period the Town's small staff also included Noel's daughter, Kasey Lesher, as utility billing clerk, and Noel's son-in-law, T.R. Lesher, as water operator. Investigators traced $267,160 of the misappropriated money to Noel's personal Bank of America cards, $191,777 to PayPal, and $30,681 to Venmo -- much of the latter for the purchase, grooming, and transport of dogs, including a puppy bought with breeding rights for Noel's own dog-breeding side business. When auditors compared the Town's real bank records to the copies Noel had handed them, they found 64 transactions worth $62,641.93 where she had altered the listed payee -- turning a $1,500 check made out to herself into one labeled "Small Engine Repair."

Not every finding involved five- or six-figure sums.▸ Aday misappropriated $705 by ringing up personal purchases -- a pair of shoes among them -- on his Town-issued debit card, and admitted in an interview he never paid it back. Noel separately pulled $7,000 from the Cemetery Fund via four checks made out to herself despite performing no documented cemetery work; those checks were among the ones she altered on the bank statements she gave investigators. The Town paid $29,878.14 in supplemental dental, vision, and AFLAC insurance premiums without Board approval, mostly with no payroll deduction to offset it. And from a utility system serving about 400 customers, more than $72,656 in cash payments -- collected, then never deposited -- went missing between 2020 and 2025, the audit found, because Town Hall kept its cash drawer unlocked with a spare key sitting nearby.

Noel's most consequential move may be the one the audit lays out most plainly.▸ From 2012 through 2019 she never remitted the Town's payroll tax withholdings to the IRS, running up $176,887 in unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties. Rather than tell the Board, she signed the Town up -- without its knowledge or approval -- for a $210,400 contract with a private tax-resolution firm, 20/20 Tax Resolution, Inc. The audit's finding is blunt: none of that $210,400 went toward the IRS debt itself. As of May 2024, the Town still owed the full $176,887, and only then entered a $500-a-month installment plan directly with the IRS -- the arrangement it could have made four years, and $210,400, earlier.

None of this required much sophistication to hide.▸ The audit found the Purchase Order reports Noel routinely handed the Board omitted debit-card and electronic transactions entirely -- one report covering August-October 2020 showed $26,380 in check payments, when the Town had actually spent $83,020, more than three times as much. The Town also never filed the annual audits state law requires -- the one outside check that might have caught the pattern years sooner. Not every trustee looked away: Trustee Joel Siria and former Trustees Duane Branham and Kara Cook pushed for financial records and were rebuffed by Noel and Aday. But the audit's verdict on the Board as a governing body is direct: "Although these losses are the responsibility of the alleged perpetrators, the Board also bears responsibility for failing to provide the oversight needed to protect public funds."

The audit draws a hard line around its own authority: determining anyone's guilt is "the exclusive jurisdiction of law enforcement, prosecutorial, and/or judicial authorities" -- the State Auditor documents the money trail, it doesn't prosecute.▸ What the Town has done on its own: after firing Noel in July 2024 and Aday two months later, the Board opened new bank accounts under its own control, froze the cemetery accounts Noel and Aday had run without legal authority to operate a privately-owned cemetery, and began the legal process of acquiring that cemetery outright. The Leshers resigned in May 2026, weeks before the audit's release. What the audit can't fully answer is how much more was taken: investigators said records at the Town's storage facility and temporary Town Hall had been destroyed, on top of a water leak that damaged files at Town Hall itself -- meaning the $1,022,412 figure is a floor, not a ceiling.