Blue Hills Civic Association Audit: McCrory directed $615,000 to close associate Sanserae Cicero. $84k for employee handbook revisions that weren’t. “Strongly suggest fraud and misrepresentation.” $1.7 million haul.

Tuesday afternoon brought the release of the long-awaited audit of Blue Hills Civic Association (BHCA) and its generous grant recipient programs. The 64-page document by CliftonLarsonAllen LLP is thick with unreconciled and unaccounted for expenditures. There are references to the prominent role sate Senator Douglas McCrory (D-Bloomfield) had in determining the distribution of millions in public funds to nonprofit groups.

The audit gives a leading role to close McCrory associate Sanserae Cicero, a recipient of BHCA grants and contracts for work the auditors struggled to identify. One telling example is the revising of the BHCA employee handbook that the nonprofit paid $84,000 to Cicero’s SHEBA Consulting to perform. The auditors compared the 2007 BHCA employee handbook to the one Cicero eventually provided in 2024 and found the only differences between the two were in the formatting and presentation, not the substance.

The auditors, who are generally cautious in their conclusions, write, “The duplication of invoice line items, lack of supporting documentation, and absence of deliverables strongly suggest potential fraud and misrepresentation.”

That mysterious $84,000 to SHEBA was less than 5% of what SHEBA Consulting or Cicero received in just over a year. The audit concludes in a trio of sentences:

Over a 13-month period, BHCA distributed $1,100,200 either to SHEBA Consulting or directly to Ms. Cicero. Additionally, at the direction of Senator McCrory, BHCA was instructed to grant Ms. Cicero $615,000 in FY’25 through a passthrough of legislative funds from Upper Albany Neighborhood Collaborative. This beings the total amount of direct and indirect disbursements to $1,715,200.

Auditors could find no evidence that a $250,000 intern program that SHEBA claimed to run ever existed. SHEBA promised youths hands on experience with business experts.

Published January 20, 2026.