SANTA MARIA - Central Coast Congresswoman Lois Capps has suddenly found herself in the middle of a tax controversy. A conservative website has uncovered that Capps failed to report money she made while renting out her Santa Barbara home to the IRS.
The Daily Caller report reveals Capps failed to report more than $40,000 in rental income from a former campaign staffer who lived in her Santa Barbara home from 2001 to 2005 on her tax returns and waited until this year to pay the back taxes owed.
"There's no ethics violations here", says Capps' campaign spokesperson Jeffrey Millman, "as soon as we found out about this earlier this year, Lois filed amended tax returns and cleared it up right away, those amended returns on her website for everyone to look at."
Capps is in a tightly contested re-election campaign against former California Lieutenant Governor and republican Abel Maldonado.
"Lois Capps is asking the voters to believe that someone was living in her house, who was her staffer, who was getting paid through the campaign, who was presumably giving a rent check every month and somehow five years went by before she disclosed it to Congress and another five years went by on top of that before she disclosed it to the IRS, it doesn't pass the believability test", says Maldonado for Congress Communications Director Kurt Bardella.
The Capps campaign has attacked Maldonado for failing to disclose his personal tax returns from his years in public office and for refusing to pay millions of dollars in federal tax owed from his days working with his family-owned farming business in Santa Maria.
Capps issued a brief statement about her tax discrepancy Thursday afternoon and took another jab at Maldonado by saying, "Once I realized there was a mistake, I immediately fixed it. I would hope my opponent would do the same."
Abel Maldonado says his tax dispute with the IRS involves deductions with his family business that date back many years. Maldonado says he's ready to pay whatever he owes once there is a successfully negotiated resolution with the IRS.
