(Headline USA) Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks reportedly owes tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes after taking advantage of tax breaks for which she was not qualified, the Baltimore Sun reported.
In 2003, Alsobrooks—a Prince George’s County executive currently running against former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat—bought a home in Washington, D.C., that had belonged to her grandparents. When her grandparents lived in the home, the property received two tax deductions: a homestead exemption and a senior-disability deduction.
The property became ineligible for those tax deductions after being purchased by Alsobrooks. But Alsobrooks never informed the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue of that change. In fact, she did not remove her grandparents’ names from the deed of the house until she sold it in 2018, according to government records.
“There is no way for the Office of Tax and Revenue to know if a property owner actually lives in the property,” said Brianna Jordan, a spokesperson for the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue. “By law, a property owner is required to alert OTR within 30 days of their change in status if they are no longer domiciled at the property.”
Records show more than 26 property-tax bills were sent to Alsobrooks’s D.C. address from 2003 to 2018, but Alsobrooks insisted she never saw them.
“The bills weren’t sent to me. They were actually sent to my grandmother,” claimed the woman who wants to be one of the most powerful lawmakers in the nation.
“I was just paying through the mortgage company, but the bills in D.C. weren’t sent to me,” she continued. “They were in someone else’s name, so I didn’t know because they weren’t sent to me.”
Her campaign further insisted that Alsobrooks never meant to exploit these tax deductions, and that “she immediately sought to correct them.”
According to D.C., the total bill for Alsobrooks’s unpaid property taxes now stands at $47,580.56.
This is not the only property Alsobrooks tried to avoid paying taxes on. She also exploited the homestead tax exemption for a Maryland property that she rented out.
Hogan has blasted Alsobrooks’s tax hypocrisy as “concerning,” arguing, “For someone who’s talking about raising taxes on hard-working people at the federal, state, and local level, to have not paid her own taxes is something that she’s going to have to answer for.”
Several of Maryland’s top Democrat officials once considered to be rising stars have been convicted in recent years for similar crimes involving political corruption. Among them are former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and former state Attorney General Marilyn Mosby.
