The Democratic candidate for Georgia’s governor race, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has a long history of missing important deadlines. After recently failing to submit her campaign finance report, new details emerged about a federal tax lien for unpaid taxes.
How much did Keisha Lance Bottoms' family owe in taxes? In 2021, Bottoms’ husband, Derek Bottoms, was issued a $342,851.97 federal tax lien for unpaid taxes in tax years 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2019. This lien was eventually satisfied in 2022.
How does this clash with Bottoms’ record of transparency? Throughout her Mayoral campaign in 2017, Bottoms championed the demand for renewed transparency. She went so far as to propose a policy requiring every candidate to file five years' worth of tax returns 70 days before their designated election.
She would have failed to meet this standard because she had not released her own at the time. When her income tax returns eventually were released, they were unsigned and heavily redacted.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the tax returns didn’t include all the schedules that would have been submitted to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Bottoms also only released her tax returns after extensive public prodding, after her opponent, Mary Norwood, disclosed her own tax information.
What does this mean for the Bottoms Campaign? The campaign website does not list transparency as one of its top issues, despite that being a central issue for Bottoms’ Mayoral campaign. All things considered, that might have been the right approach.
What does the Rick Jackson for Georgia Campaign have to say? The Jackson Campaign declined to comment on Bottoms’ tax record, but did comment on the missing campaign finance report.
Garrison Douglas, spokesman for the Jackson Campaign, stated:
- “This is the most basic of tasks for someone who wants to be governor, especially for a candidate with a history of campaign finance violations. When Keisha Lance Bottoms ran for mayor, she was fined tens of thousands of dollars for campaign finance violations. She abused Atlanta taxpayer dollars as mayor, and she can’t manage her own campaign finances. How can Georgians trust her to manage their hard-earned dollars?”
