At Florence City Council’s June 11 meeting, Chief Financial Officer Linda Chapman officially announced her retirement.
After nearly 20 years of service, Chapman said she finally felt it was the right time to step down and hand over the reigns to someone who can preserve the security and trustworthiness of the city’s finances.
Coming into her position, Chapman had been working in the private sector as an auditor for nearly two decades when she was tasked with auditing the city of Florence, and she found an inexplicable fault with the city’s financial records- a nearly $4 million hole in the city’s books.
Chapman was more than nervous to bring up what she’d found, she said. Her predecessor, Ron Epling, had been the city’s CFO for over a decade- a figure that seemed beyond suspicion.
Epling was eventually convicted on embezzling funds by creating a bank account that was the exact same name as the one used by the city, and deposited the money in that account. Epling would die in jail in October of 2003 serving a 16-year sentence.
After assuming the role of Florence’s CFO, Chapman’s first task was clear as day: protect the city from someone in her position.
“Personnel was a challenge, especially rebuilding a department that didn’t understand the lack of policies and procedures that allowed the previous finance director being able to embezzle,” Chapman said. “Nobody really realized what was going on.”
Chapman’s service to the city of Florence centered around building trust back up for the community, despite her being the person who caught Epling in 2002, she knew it would take more than that.
“A lot of it was just shoring up staff members, putting in policies and procedures, and changing internal controls around,” Chapman explained.
She would develop a thorough financial security system for the city that essentially would make it nearly impossible for one person to totally oversee the city’s money and finances.
She wouldn’t stop there, though. During her tenure, Chapman would also go on to work with several other local governments and even other private companies that saw the work she did in Florence.
Chapman worked alongside city officials in Covington and Kenton County, who suspected that they might be the targets of embezzlement and wanted to implement the systems she put into place in Florence, as well as catch the perpetrators.
In one case, she helped officials catch Bob Due, Covington’s former finance director, in 2014 after he embezzled $800,000.
Looking back at her career with Florence, Chapman says she wouldn’t change a thing.
“It’s been a great ride here. It was a little more of a challenge than I thought it would be when I started out,” Chapman said. “There was a lot of work to do.”
If you’re looking to apply to become Florence’s next CFO, applications are being accepted up until 5:00pm on Monday, June 17th.