Two business owners who received nearly $2 million in state grants with the help of Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, have failed to turn over records to auditors who are examining what happened to more than $15 million in public funds that went to the Blue Hills Civic Association in recent years.
According to state officials, Sonserae Cicero, who is the subject of an ongoing federal criminal investigation along with McCrory, has not turned over records showing how her businesses spent roughly $1.7 million in state funding that she received through the Blue Hills Civic Association between 2022 and 2024.
State officials also confirmed that auditors have not received financial records from Roberta Hoskie, the owner of a RH Realty Services, which received $225,000 through Blue Hills in 2023 and 2024 to provide mortgage coaching to minority households.
The lack of information from those two businesses could limit the state Department of Economic and Community Development’s ability to accurately determine whether millions of dollars in funding, which was controlled by McCrory and Blue Hills, was used appropriately.
DECD did not respond to a question about whether the two business owners refused to comply with the auditors’ requests or whether they simply failed to respond.
Records show that Cicero’s businesses, which operate under different versions of the name SHEBA, netted more than 10% of the money that McCrory helped to funnel to Blue Hills from 2020 and 2025.
The fact that Cicero failed to cooperate with state auditors is likely to draw significant public attention given that the FBI and a federal grand jury have also demanded records about her businesses and her relationship with McCrory.
It is not the first time, however, that Cicero has not turned over records related to a government-funded program. The CT Mirror also confirmed that Cicero did not provide officials at the city of Hartford with documentation that would show what work her company undertook as part of a small business training program that was cancelled last year.
Cicero did not return phone calls for this story. Several phone numbers that were listed for Hoskie and her business are no longer in service, and she could not be reached.
McCrory, who has served in the Connecticut legislature for two decades, also did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
But during a recent television interview, McCrory said he did nothing wrong.
“I believe as more and more facts come out, you’ll find out that a lot of those resources were spent appropriately,” McCrory told WTNH.
It’s not clear what steps the state could take to force Cicero and Hoskie to turn over the records that auditors requested.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s office said he is in favor of using any legal avenues available to the state to force the two business owners to turn over their internal records.
“We support using all legal means within our power to compel the subrecipients to comply and produce documents,” Rob Blanchard, Lamont’s spokesman, said Thursday.
During an interview with the Connecticut Mirror in February, DECD Commissioner Dan O’Keefe said he believes the state has a legal right to review the financial records of any entity that signed a contract with Blue Hills to receive part of the state grant funding.
“There’s examples where we have a contractual right to that information, and we will exercise those rights,” O’Keefe said.
Both SHEBA and RH Realty Services signed those types of contracts, according to records reviewed by the CT Mirror. The documents state that the two businesses agreed that any records pertaining to the money they received “shall be made available to the state and its auditors upon request.”
Agency officials have not confirmed whether it will take the companies to court.
“DECD will continue to pursue measures to ensure full compliance where appropriate,” Jim Watson, a spokesman for DECD, said.
Blanchard said the companies are likely to face other consequences too, like being banned from receiving any additional state funding in the future.
Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, said both Cicero and Hoskie are entitled to due process in this situation, but he said the fact that they are not willing to comply with requests from state auditors is problematic when millions of dollars in state funding is involved.
Sampson sits on the legislature’s Government Oversight Committee, which has advanced legislation this year that would set new rules for state legislative earmarks.
“I firmly believe in innocent until proven guilty, but I think to the casual observer it doesn’t look good,” he said.
The state audit of the Blue Hills Civic Association was opened in early 2025 because the 62-year-old Hartford nonprofit reported that it lost $300,000 in grant funding through a fraudulent wire transfer.
After combing through Blue Hills’ finances and internal records, however, the auditors found several other serious problems with how the nonprofit spent millions of dollars in state taxpayer money.
The auditors obtained records that showed McCrory, who represents parts of Hartford, Bloomfield and Windsor, personally decided how Blue Hills would subgrant millions of dollars, even though he had no official role at the nonprofit.
Auditors also raised questions about whether Cicero and her businesses performed all of the work for which they were paid.
“The disbursement activity between BHCA and SHEBA Consulting, as well as directly to Ms. Cicero, reveals a troubling pattern of financial mismanagement, potential fraud, and a complete breakdown of internal controls,” the auditors wrote in their initial report, which was released in February.
The auditors’ warnings about potential fraud and the lack of financial controls within Blue Hills prompted Gov. Ned Lamont to call for reforms to how lawmakers routinely earmark money for nonprofits and other organizations. And it led the governor to call on McCrory to “step back” from his leadership positions in the General Assembly, where he serves as chairman of the legislature’s Education Committee.
The findings also immediately sparked a new round of auditing for all of the other people and businesses that received subgrants from Blue Hills.
For the past two months, DECD said, auditors with the firm Clifton Larson Allen have been contacting those subrecipients and asking them to turn over additional evidence of how they utilized state funding.
Watson, the DECD spokesman, said that of the 31 subrecipients contacted during that process, Cicero and Hoskie were the only ones who failed to turn over the documentation that was requested.
The auditors already have records from Blue Hills that explain what type of work Cicero’s and Hoskie’s businesses were supposed to perform.
Those documents show that Cicero’s businesses were supposed to provide human resources consulting services to Blue Hills and were later awarded $1.2 million to set up and run a “youth empowerment program.”
At the same time, Hoskie, who sits on the state’s Minority Business Initiative Advisory Council with McCrory, promised Blue Hills that her company would run a “mortgage readiness program” tailored to individuals who want to become first-time home buyers.
The records that Blue Hills sent to auditors last year show that Hoskie reported she was able to coach seven prospective home owners with the first $150,000 her company received from Blue Hills.
A spreadsheet and program summary that Hoskie shared with Blue Hills in 2024 showed that only one of those families closed on a home. And of the seven families that she was assisting, none of them was reportedly looking to buy a house in the North End of Hartford, which is in the district that McCrory represents.
Around the same time that she submitted that report, she also emailed McCrory, thanking him for the money and asking him to fund her work for another year. She later received $75,000.
“I wanted to express my sincere thanks, Senator McCrory, for your dedication in securing funding for crucial community programs,” Hoskie wrote.
“I sincerely thank you for funding us last year and giving us the opportunity to help families create generational wealth. I hope that we can have an even greater impact this year!” she added.
Sampson, the Republican lawmaker on the Government Oversight Committee, said the state’s current struggle to obtain information about how nearly $2 million in state grant funds were spent highlights the need for stricter controls on how earmarks are allocated.
“The problem is that we don’t have an existing process that includes appropriate auditing. We don’t have an appropriate process for determining eligibility to start with. I think that’s all kind of the problem,” Sampson said.
“I mean, who do you blame in a case like this? Do you blame the people who are taking advantage of the system, or do you blame the people that created a system that is so conducive to corruption?”