Tax Office Thefts Occured In Gandhi's Tenure

DC At Large Councilman Kwame Brown told me on Tuesday that he is convinced "It's now time for the person at the top to go". That would be Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi.

This after the Washington Post reported Tuesday that nearly two and a half million dollars in suspicious tax refund checks were issued without the required court orders or sometimes to companies that don't even exist.

The payments went out from October 1999 to June 2000 while Gandhi was still Director at the Tax and Revenue Office which seems to contradict his previous position last week that the theft of up to 30 million dollars, recently uncovered, could not have happened while he was in charge at the Tax office. Gandhi says he personally signed off on all major refunds.

Let's face it. this doesn't look good for the man with the reputation for having saved the city from bankruptcy and restored its good name on Wall street.

Gandhi has released 15 people since the big tax scandal broke...including Sherryl Hobbs Newman, his hand picked director for the Tax Office, saying it was a total collapse in management that allowed the massive thefts allegedly headed by jailed tax manager Harriet Walters and her alleged inside accomplice Diane Gustus.


The DC Council, on Tuesday, voted to establish its own committee to look into the biggest money scandal in home rule history. The body will be jointly chaired by Chairman Vince Gray and Finance and Revenue Committee Chair Jack Evans. It should be pointed out that the DC Council, especially the legislators who've been around for years, might have listened to their own Auditor who tried to point out the problems at the Tax Office that might lend themselves to corruption. Where was the oversight?

We've already reported here and on Nine News Now how Harriet Walters, known as "Mother Harriet" inside Tax and Revenue loaned out thousands of dollars for every need to her co-workers. Weddings, home repairs, down payments on homes, jewelry and diamonds and combination safes to store their valuables.

She took them to Vegas and Atlantic City to gamble.There were shopping sprees at Neiman-Marcus where she spent one point four million dollars according to prosecutors and hundreds of thousands more at Saks Fifth avenue, Macy's and other high end stores.

Sources say Walters bought 4 front row seasons tickets to Wizards games. She wrote checks for five and ten thousand dollars at a time to office workers who cashed them on their lunch breaks, returning the money to Walters.

She owned a home, mortgage free,on Oregon Avenue in the District, facing Rock Creek park. There were also homes in New Jersey and the Virgin Islands. Walters cover story in the office was that she had a rich father who had been a banker in the Caribbean.

Thirteen people, including Walters and Gustus have been named as co-conspirators in this case. Sources say others will be charged, including an employee in the DC Treasurer's Office who helped get the bogus checks through government checkpoints.

I'm also told that scores of Tax and Revenue employees are seeking legal counsel because they never repaid the loans from Walters and they never declared the money as income meaning they could have problems with the IRS...if they get by the scrutiny of federal prosecutors who are already talking possible plea bargains with some key people.