U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ chief of staff received a letter of “reproval” Friday for failing to list $54,000 he was paid for consulting on his financial disclosure reports and income tax returns.
According to the letter from the U.S. House Committee on Ethics, first obtained by Washington correspondent Jamie Dupree with AM750 and 95.5 FM WSB radio, Michael Collins’ “conduct has brought discredit upon the House of Representatives.”
A unanimous vote by the bi-partisan committee was taken Monday and the letter to Collins was dated Friday.
According to the letter and a report on the investigation, the re-election campaigns for Lewis, a Democrat, paid Collins $5,000 in 2005, $7,000 in 2006, $5,000 in 2007 and $10,000 in 2008. In 2009, Collins was paid $27,000, which exceeded the limit on outside income for senior congressional staff.
None of those payments were included on disclosure reports or on his income tax returns for those years.
“These mistakes were not intentional but were due to an inadvertent omission in disclosure,” Collins said in the statement.
He said that as "a chief of staff, it is my responsibility to know and follow the rules of financial disclosure. Therefore, I accept full responsibility for the omission in my filing.”
Collins told the committee’s investigators that because he never received a “form W-2 or 1099 to document his payments, he never thought about the payments in terms of income, and so he never reported them,” according to the committee’s report.
The committee asked Collins to amend his financial reports and income tax returns and report to the committee how much he pays the IRS in back taxes, fines and interest. He also must pay by the end of the year a $1,000 fine for the omissions on the disclosure reports.
“I will meet all the terms of the committee’s recommendations and look forward to the complete resolution of this matter,” Collins said.
About the Author
