BLYTHEVILLE, AR (abc24.com) - If there's anyone you don't want to be indebted to, it's Uncle Sam.
One Arkansas city is learning that the hard way. The city of Blytheville owes the IRS millions of dollars for unpaid taxes.
Arkansas State Police could soon investigate the city's handling of its finances. In the meantime tax payers may end up paying the debt.
Blytheville Mayor James Sanders wasn't in office three months when had an unexpected guest.
“We were in our office and we received a visit from the IRS,” Sanders said.
The message: pay up.
“We owed an excess of over three million dollars,” Sanders said.
The City failed to pay a year's worth of withholding taxes to the IRS. That resulted in more than a million dollars worth of penalties and interest for a grand total of three and half million dollars owed to Uncle Sam.
Sanders says it didn't happen when he was in office, but now it's his problem. We called the former mayor Barrett Harrison.
“It appears the finance office didn't pay all of the payroll taxes or certain payroll periods on and off all the way back to 2006,” Harrison said.
We asked how that happened, Harrison replied, “That's the million dollar question right there.”
“You would think there's enough things in place to double check and recheck to make sure things are being done the way they're supposed to be. Didn't happen,” Don Ledford said.
Taxpayers like Ledford are ticked they'll have to pick up the tab for someone dropping the three million dollar ball.
One debt payment plan on the table is a voter approved sales tax.
“As others have said, I agree, it's the better of two evils,” Ledford said.
“If the sales tax is not passed, everything is going to be gone, we won't have police, we won't have firemen, we won't have anything,” said Blytheville resident Hunter Williams.
