(November 17, 2006)—The Falls County Central Appraisal District has filed suit against the Citizens State Bank, alleging that unauthorized and often forged checks totaling more than $200,000 were cashed without required signatures between December 1998 and May 2006.

The suit alleges the signature card filled out for the checking account maintained by the appraisal district at the Marlin branch of the bank required two authorized signatures of appraisal board members for checks to be paid, but that “A significant number of checks, for unjustified expenditures, were paid on instruments bearing only one signature.”

It also alleges other checks were presented with two signatures, but that at least one of the signatures was forged.

The suit includes a long list of checks in amounts ranging from several hundred dollars to as much as about $1,700 that it alleges were paid without appropriate signatures.

The appraisal district is seeking repayment of $211,534.90 plus attorneys’ fees as well as interest and other unspecified damages.

News Ten contacted a bank official for a comment on the suit, but the bank did not have an immediate response to the suit.

The suit is the latest development in a still-unraveling scandal that surrounds the appraisal district.

In July, former appraisal district employee Candace Grams, 30, of Marlin was indicted for theft by a public servant after an investigation determined that signatures had been forged on appraisal district checks.

She was freed on bond after the indictment was handed up, but was arrested again in late August on new charges stemming from the alleged irregularities in the office.

She was named in indictments handed up on Aug. 25 charging 19 counts of tampering with government records and two counts of fabricating physical evidence.

The indictments stemmed from allegations that appraisal values were changed on several properties and that false documents were filed.

She was freed on bonds totaling $31,500.

Then in October, Falls County Tax Assessor-Collector Kate Vande Veegaete, 57, was named in a three-count indictment charging misapplication of fiduciary property and tampering with a government record.

The indictments were handed up after investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s Office called witnesses before the grand jury in Marlin as part of the ongoing investigation of alleged irregularities.

The indictment alleges Vande Veegate “defrauded Falls County, the city of Marlin, and the Marlin Independent School District by altering government documents and failing to collect nearly $10,000 in delinquent property taxes,” according to a release from the Attorney General’s Office.

Specifically, the indictment claims that Vande Veegaete changed appraisal values of property owned by Eva Joyce Burks, the mother of the county’s former deputy chief appraiser, Candace Grams, “In an attempt to quash a tax judgment placed against Burks' property due to unpaid taxes from 1993 through 2001,” the Attorney General’s Office said.

The indictment also alleges she failed to cash a $9,538.52 check issued by the lien holder on Burk’s property in payment for back taxes, penalties, interest and other costs and “created a fraudulent installment agreement and sent the false document to the lien holder to make it appear that Burks had entered into a payment plan with the Falls County Tax Office,” the Attorney General’s Office said.

Falls County Judge Tom Sehon formally asked Sen. Kip Averitt, R-McGregor, in August to seek the state probe of the alleged irregularities.

Sehon requested Averitt to “ask the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Comptroller of Public Accounts to intervene in an ongoing investigation in Falls County.”

“The investigation concerns irregularities within the Falls County Appraisal District Tax Office and possibly elsewhere,” Sehon wrote.

“These agencies are welcome to investigate any and all Falls County offices, and individuals, or anyone else deemed essential to the investigation, and will have my full cooperation,” Sehon wrote.

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