City Hall has been running on empty for a good many years and that condition of sustained financial crisis caused the council's money managers to make into many ill-advised decisions. According to special advisor Dale Trujeque, the council deducted salary with-holdings for mortgage, tax and bank payments, but in some cases, never passed those payments to banking and commercial institutions, leaving the council deep in arrears and the employees way behind the 8 ball. Here are some details.
Dale Trujeque, Special Advisor
"We received a letter from the Income Tax Department about almost a month ago wherein they informed us that taxes to be paid in on behalf of the workers for fiscal year 2002/2003 was outstanding a $137,000, the amount for 2004 and 2005 undetermined, taxes outstanding that was deducted as business taxes from monies paid to these maintenance companies, these sanitation companies, never paid in to the Income Tax Department. We were given a couple years, it's at an additional $130,000+.
We were not given the figures for 2004 and 2005 and so we are estimating that income tax owed for the workers, business tax owed for these sanitation companies is somewhere in the region of half million dollars alone.
To add insult to injury, the stipend that councilors of the previous council collected was never taxed. Now most of them had a job outside of the council, those stipends were taxable. So while the workers' money that was legally deducted was not paid in, those people were taking home their entire stipend.
We've had our workers had their stuff taken back by Courts because the money was never paid in on behalf of the workers. We are trying to bring the Courts' account current. Money deducted for loans for workers from the banks, the Council is now faced with a situation where workers, pensioners of the council, are bringing charges laid on their accounts for penalty fees that we now have to incur because the money was never paid in or wasn't paid in on time on behalf of these people.
DFC, some of our people, their houses are about to be auctioned because the DFC loans were not paid up. The deductions...everything I am saying the deductions were made from the workers' money or in the case of the business taxes, from the sanitation companies' money but they were never paid up."
Perhaps as a gift form a government sympathetic to the former city hall administration, no penalties were accrued on the tax arrears.
