Former Robinson tax collector Frank Murgia says that it's been hard having his reputation sullied in public since he was voted out of office more than two years ago.

"I don't like it," he said. "I truthfully don't."

Mr. Murgia who spoke at the commissioners' Monday night meeting, also says the mistakes people have found in his tax office records have been blown out of proportion.

Many of them stem from a computer crash and others were the result of lot and block numbers of properties being recorded incorrectly.

"I showed them all," he said in an interview Tuesday. "All that needs to be done is to correct the posting" of the lots and blocks.

Mr. Murgia was tax collector for 25 years before losing the post to Ed Ritter in November 2005. Soon after taking office, Mr. Ritter reported finding errors that may have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The township ordered an audit in the fall of 2006, then engaged in a long back-and-forth with Mr. Murgia over boxes of records he had taken home with him.

There were some real problems -- the township in 2006 put liens on more than 1,000 properties for delinquent taxes -- but when the audit was released earlier this year, it covered only the years 2002-07 and found only $12,445 in uncollected revenue, primarily from delinquencies that were not charged.

The other question has been the $191,000 that was discovered last year in two accounts controlled by Mr. Murgia.

He said Tuesday that the money was mostly from sheriff's sales that "caved in," with multiple creditors having uncertain claims. Almost all of it has now been sorted out and disbursed, he said -- and the whispers about embezzlement are all baseless.

"All I want is for them to say, 'Frank, you stole money,' then I will tell my lawyer to sue them," he said.

Robinson officials have said no such thing. Since the two accounts became public in November, they have consistently said there is no evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.

Mr. Murgia told Robinson Commissioners Monday that he is bothered by the proposed tax on parking spaces, and said it is a misconception that businesses don't pay toward township services.

He said he is tired of being "smashed" publicly and saying nothing. But the smashing may end soon. After a brief exchange between Mr. Murgia and Mr. Ritter Monday night, the two men agreed to sit down and try to work through the remaining questions.

But the drawn-out complexity of the debate has led Mr. Murgia to this conclusion about tax collection: Rather than leaving it in the hands of an elected official, "they should farm it out" to professional firms.