Remember when I said that the President must report and pay taxes just like you and me? That’s also true for members of Congress and their staff. Members of Congress receive an annual salary of $174,000 while salaries for Congressional staff vary but typically top out at rates around $170,000 (downloads as a pdf). Those salaries are reportable and income tax is payable on those amounts.
Apparently, congressional staffer Issac Lanier Avant of Arlington, Virginia, didn’t think that rule applied to him. This week, Avant pleaded guilty to willfully failing to file an individual income tax return.
According to court documents (downloads as a pdf), Avant was a staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2002. Beginning in 2009 through 2013, Avant was paid $170,000 – funded by you and me – but failed to timely file personal income tax returns for any of those years. For the tax years 2006 and 2007, Avant filed returns but, according to prosecutors, those returns each contained false deductions.
The deception doesn’t stop there. According to the Department of Justice, not only did Avant fail to file and pay taxes, in May 2005, Avant he filed a form with his employer (that would be the federal government) that falsely claimed he was exempt from federal income taxes. As a result, Avant did not have any federal tax withheld from his paycheck until the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stepped in and required that his employer (again, the federal government) begin withholding on his check in January 2013.
In August, the DOJ announced that Avant had been charged but did not publicly name the member of Congress for whom Avant worked. Following Avant’s plea, the Department of Justice again noted that he worked for a member of Congress but kept mum on the name.
It didn’t take too much digging to find out that Avant worked for Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS). According to Thompson’s website, the Congressman serves the “largest land mass district in the state of Mississippi.” Rep. Thompson’s website also lists his members of staff: Avant’s name still appears prominently as Chief of Staff.
When the charges against Avant were made public earlier this year, Rep. Thompson said he would not fire Avant “until he has had his day in court.” I reached out to Rep. Thompson to ask whether he had a comment on Avant’s plea and whether he had plans to keep Avant on staff. As of this post, Rep. Thompson has not responded.
Sentencing for Avant is scheduled for January 17, 2017. Avant faces up to one year in prison, a term of supervised release, and penalties. As part of his plea agreement, Avant has already agreed to pay restitution of $153,522 to the IRS.
If the fact that the Chief of Staff of a Congressperson didn’t pay his taxes feels disconcerting, get ready to feel worse. According to the IRS, federal workers and retirees owed more than $3.5 billion in back taxes in 2014. The total number of federal workers and retirees who haven’t paid their taxes for the same period is 305,000, representing 3.1% of the federal workforce; that number does not include those employees on a payment plan.
According to the data, when it comes to Congress, employees in the House (5%) had a higher delinquency rate than those in the Senate (3.5%) – both of those rates are higher than the average delinquency for federal employees. A slight consolation: that’s still better than the rate for the general public: that delinquency rate is between 8-9% each year.