Baltimore Elected Officials Charged For Somehow Forgetting To Pay Their Taxes

Now that a new Mayor is on the way to City Hall in Baltimore, Charm City will soon put its unpleasant history of corrupt elected officials behind them and begin a new era of honesty and transparency in politics. Gone will be the days of Mayors and other top municipal officials going to prison for racketeering, embezzlement, and tax evasion. And once that’s accomplished, they’ll be able to focus on quashing their massive gang violence and murder problems. Trust me. It’s going to be glorious.

Oh, wait… there might be a couple of final wrinkles to iron out of this plan. It seems that the city’s top prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, and her husband, incoming City Council President Nick Mosby, have received some unpleasant news from the IRS. The power couple allegedly “forgot” to pay a significant amount of their federal income taxes. For at least three years. And now a lien for nearly $50K against them has been placed by the taxman. But hey… they’re busy people, right? Who among us hasn’t forgotten the odd item on their to-do list from time to time? (Baltimore Sun)

The IRS has placed a $45,000 lien against Marilyn and Nick Mosby — Baltimore’s top prosecutor and its Democratic nominee for City Council president, respectively — for three years worth of unpaid federal taxes, records show.

Notice of the lien seeking to collect unpaid taxes from 2014, 2015 and 2016 was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court in February. The Internal Revenue Service filing shows the couple owes nearly $23,000 for the 2014 tax year, more than $19,000 for 2015 and about $3,000 for 2016.

Marilyn Mosby said she was unaware of the lien and declined to discuss the matter further. Nick Mosby did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time that the couple has run afoul of the IRS. There was a smaller, $5k lien put on their property in 2013 because of unpaid taxes. Ms. Mosby claims that she’s “unaware” of any lien from the IRS, but this can’t have taken her by surprise. The IRS always makes multiple attempts to contact delinquent taxpayers and work out some sort of resolution before they resort to placing liens. And the agency confirmed for the media that they have made “multiple attempts” to obtain payment from Mosby and her husband prior to this action.

The Mosbys have been “rising stars” of the Baltimore Democratic power structure for the past decade, with many people expecting Marilyn Mosby to wind up being the mayor at some point. Those plans may have been put on hold after her disastrous handling of the aftermath of the Freddie Gray riots and her attempts to prosecute multiple police officers involved in the original incident. (Each and every attempt at prosecution failed.) But they also seem to have the same problems staying on the straight and narrow when it comes to their financial affairs as too many other Baltimore officials.

Keep in mind that the last Mayor to be elected before interim Mayor Jack Young took over, Catherine Pugh, was also hit for tax evasion. That was on top of the many hundreds of thousands of dollars she filched from various companies and agencies by “selling” them copies of her Healthy Holly children’s books. She’s currently cooling her heels in federal prison.

Two mayors before her, Sheila Dixon wound up resigning and barely avoiding a stretch in jail via a plea deal after embezzling money from the city in the form of gift/debit cards intended to help impoverished children. And don’t even get me started on the Board of Directors of the University of Maryland Medical System. Two-thirds of them resigned in a single week after the exposure of all the self-dealing and grifting that was going on in the scandal that wound up taking Pugh down.

Baltimore has had a massive corruption problem for years and they don’t seem to be able to shake it. The inability of the city’s top prosecutor and incoming City Council President to simply pay their personal income taxes is yet another symptom of a much larger issue.

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