IRS Piles on City of Bell

The City of Bell in California has been in the media a lot given its corrupt city officials paying themselves huge amounts of money. Now the IRS is getting involved as well.

There is a large section of the public that think government officials are paid far too much and live far too cushy an existence in their careers. Stories like those coming out of the City of Bell certainly seem to support this. The City of Bell, of course, has been in the news endlessly for the absurd corruption of its city officials. 

The City of Bell is one of the poorer areas in California. It is also a fairly small area within the Great Los Angeles area. Despite this, investigations resulted in findings that the city officials were paying themselves huge salaries and benefits for essentially doing nothing. We are talking about salaries of nearly $800,000 plus in some cases. The real beauty was the fact the city was paying its Chief of Police $457,000, which is more than the Chief of Police for all of Los Angeles makes! To say residents were unhappy to learn this was a minor understatement. 

The discovery of the madness in the City of Bell has led to a veritable law enforcement investigation. There are so many parties going after the Bell officials that one half expects the EPA to indict them for something. Well, things are getting even worse now. The IRS has two investigation agents now spending their time at the offices of the City going through all kinds of paperwork despite the City being on the edge of insolvency as it is. 

So, what is the IRS investigating? Bonds sold by the City to raise funds. The City sold bonds for all kinds of civic projects including expanding the convention center and building a sports complex. The problem is the bonds were sold, but the projects were never done. So…where did the $26 million or so go? The IRS would really, really, really like to know!

One area where it may have gone is to a hush fund of sort. The City Administrator, Robert Rizzo, would apparently try to push out employees he didn’t like/trust. To allegedly entice them, he would wrap in their sick time and unpaid vacation time into a workers compensation settlement. Why would this matter? Unpaid sick leave and vacation time is taxable. Workers compensation payments are not. Yep, the IRS might be really interested in that!

The City of Bell is a massive disaster when it comes to government administration. The top officers are being indicted and the City is all but insolvent. Wait, at least the insolvency part sounds like most city, state and federal government financial situations!