(November 30, 2006)--Vehicle registrations and license renewals will resume at 8 a.m. Friday in Falls County, where the Tax Assessor-Collector’s office has been closed for more than a week.

Former County Clerk Bryant Hinson whom commissioners named Wednesday to head the office, secured the required bonding Thursday.

Hinson succeeds interim Assessor-Collector Georgie Patterson, who resigned a little more than a week after she was named to replace Assessor-Collector Kate Vande Veegaete, who resigned after she was named in a three-count indictment.

Hinson served as Falls County Clerk in the mid-1990s.

The tax office closed on Nov. 20 because of the bonding issue, but it has been in flux since Vande Veegaete’s resignation in October after she was named in a three-count indictment charging misapplication of fiduciary property and tampering with a government record. Both are state jail felonies.

The indictments against Vande Veegaete were handed up after investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s Office called witnesses before a grand jury on Oct. 11 in Marlin as part of an ongoing investigation of alleged irregularities in the Falls County Tax Appraisal District.”

Click Here For Full Press Release From Texas Attorney General’s Office

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.

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