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Cahill says campaign failure to pay taxes was an 'oversight'

Print | Comments () Posted by Martin Finucane September 1, 2010 02:11 PM

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By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff

State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill said today he accepts blame for his campaign committee failing to pay an estimated $15,000 in state income taxes over the past decade, as required by law.

State Treasurer Timothy P. Cahill

"I can't put this on anyone else," Cahill said on WRKO. "This is our mistake."

Cahill said someone on his campaign – whom he did not name – incorrectly believed that the campaign did not have to pay state taxes on interest that the account had earned from investments made in certificates of deposit.

“It was never willful,” Cahill said. “It was just an oversight.”

Cahill said he mailed the state a check for the back taxes Tuesday.

"The good news is that when it was pointed out to us, we paid it, and it was not a huge mistake,” he said on WHYN radio in Springfield. “I'm not perfect. Nobody is."

A former Democrat who left the party last year to run for governor as an independent, Cahill acknowledged that his failure to pay the taxes could hurt the image he has tried to build for himself as a fiscally responsible steward of taxpayer dollars.

“I am mad at myself,” Cahill said. “This is a mistake, and I’m responsible. Obviously, I didn’t know about it because there’s no way we would not pay taxes if we thought we owed them.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker, however, criticized Cahill for failing to pay the taxes even as he agreed Tuesday to accept up to $750,000 in public campaign funds in exchange for limiting his spending to $1.5 million.

“It’s ironic that on the day after he collects hundreds of thousands in taxpayer money to fund his campaign he announced and admits that he hasn’t been paying taxes on his campaign account,” Baker said. “It's the kind of double standard -- one set of rules for Beacon Hill and one for everybody else -- that makes regular people and regular taxpayers crazy.”

Though it failed to meet state tax requirements, records of the Cahill committee, filed with state regulators, show that it did meet its federal tax obligations. Cahill’s campaign said it has paid, in all, about $102,000 in federal taxes on the interest the account has earned since 2002.