Two months after former Hamilton Mayor John Bencivengo stepped down, the township announced a plan to audit the town during the last year of his tenure.

The township will be taking a hard look at the three offices whose heads left last year: the mayor’s office, the Department of Community Planning and Compliance and the Department of Health, Recreation, Seniors and Veterans Services. Mayor Kelly Yaede said she wanted to make sure the scandal that removed her predecessor from office did not affect the township’s finances.

“We want to reassure the residents of the township that their finances are safe,” she said at the Monday press conference making the announcement.

The township’s auditor, Bob Morrison said they would not charge the township extra for the expanded audit, and the cost would be included in the $102,000 cost for the annual audit. He said they would bear the cost because the township did not take advantage of 40 hours of counsel for council built into the annual contract for the past several years.

Morrison’s accounting firm, Hodulik and Morrison, has been the township’s auditor since 2006. He said he would not be able to provide an estimate on how long the audit would take his staffers, or where it might lead.

“We will take it where it takes us,” he said.

Morrison said the expanded audit will have three steps; analysis of the township’s automatic record-keeping system, comparison of year-to-year financial records for those departments and interviews with the staff members in those departments.

He said there would be two or three staffers from his firm working on the project and he anticipates the whole audit will be finished by April.

“However long it takes them that is how long it takes them,” he said.

He said they chose the three departments because the three people in charge of them had been involved or mentioned in the Bencivengo case.

Bencivengo was convicted in November of five federal charges related to the school board corruption case against him. Marliese Ljuba, the government’s cooperating witness in the case, testified she bribed him with $12,400 in exchange for his influence with members of the Hamilton Board of Education. He will be sentenced in March and could face as much as 20 years in prison.

Rob Warney, the admitted middleman in the case,  plead guilty to a money laundering charge last June just after resigning his post as director of Community Planning and Compliance. He will also be sentenced in March, although that hearing has been moved three times, and also faces up to 20 years in the federal pen.

The former director of the department of Health and Recreation, Cathy Tramontana, was by acting mayor John Ricci after testimony in the case indicated she had taken money and trips from Ljuba and knew about the investigation for almost its entire length.

In a letter from Thomas Neff, the director for the Division of Local Government Services, he endorsed the audit, saying “the proposed plan of expanded auditing services appears appropriate and proportional to the events that occurred during the past year.”