During a March show, Glenn Beck suggested the administration punish Democrats with even minor tax problems. What if it's Beck with a tax 'accident'?

No one has been less forgiving than Glenn Beck when it comes to Democrats with tax problems. Not just the well-known ones like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but also less serious ones such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, whose husband only recently paid off $6,400 in tax liens on his auto repair business, and Nancy Killefer, who withdrew her nomination to be White House chief performance officer, citing a $946.69 tax lien on her Washington home.

Their tax issues are just one indicator of “a culture of corruption among some of the left,” Beck declared just last month in a segment on his hugely popular Fox News television show, in which he branded Geithner, Killefer, Solis and a handful of other Obama nominees “tax cheats,” whom he wouldn’t trust “with my children, let alone my children's future.”


Mocking the excuses offered by the nominees, Beck sarcastically intoned: “Oh, the tax thing, it was an accident. It was my husband's fault. I didn't do it, he did it. I didn't mean to do it. I was just working hard for the people.”

So what to make, then, of the fact that Beck has had his own minor tax problems over the past few years?

As Beck evolved from a medium-market local radio personality to a one-man media empire with top-rated radio and television shows, best-selling books, a monthly magazine and a traveling one-man comedy tour, his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

Mercury, a private corporation that lists Beck as chief executive officer and his wife, Tania Beck, alternately as vice president or secretary, since 2007 has fallen behind on its New York City business income taxes and has been cited for filing errors related to its obligations under Texas franchise tax and New York state workers' compensation insurance rules.

Beck was not available for comment, and Mercury’s president, Chris Balfe, declined a requested interview. But a source with knowledge of the situation said that Mercury’s tax issues were minor, stemmed from bureaucratic confusion and were rectified quickly once the company learned of them.

“Mercury immediately resolved these very common accounting issues,” said the source, who did not want to be identified discussing Mercury’s finances.

Dean Zerbe, national managing director for a company called alliantgroup that provides specialty tax services to accounting firms, said Beck’s situation “has the look and feel of somebody who is confronting an extraordinarily complicated tax situation — or at least the people he’s hired to do these things are — and is trying to comply but isn’t doing everything perfectly.”

The same, however, could be said of most of the Obama nominees Beck has blasted for tax problems, said Zerbe, who called them “people who were trying to comply with the spirit and the intent of the law.”

Zerbe knows whereof he speaks. From 2001 to 2008, he sleuthed out the tax problems of Bush administration nominees as a top aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on the Senate Finance Committee. It was his successors on the Finance Committee staff who last year flagged the tax problems of Geithner, as well as those of fellow Beck targets Tom Daschle (whose nomination to be Health and Human Services secretary was withdrawn after it was revealed he had failed to pay more than $100,000 in back taxes and interest), U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, both of whom were confirmed after fessing up to minor tax issues.

“Having gone back into private practice and working with small and medium-sized businesses, I’m a lot more sympathetic to the burdens that small businesses, in particular, face trying to comply with local and county and state taxes,” Zerbe said. “It’s not atypical for a small business with an accountant who is busier than a one-armed paper hanger to have trouble,” he said.

“What I think would be helpful for everyone is to have is a much bigger dose of sympathy for how complicated it is to comply with the tax laws,” Zerbe urged.

In October 2007, New York City issued a tax warrant against Mercury Radio Arts, indicating that the company had been penalized $10,927.49 for overdue 2006 general corporation taxes and still owed $7,111.03, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.

The source with knowledge of the situation explained the issue “arose during the process of the company’s transition from Philadelphia to New York” in 2006 — after Beck began hosting a daily news and commentary television show on CNN's "Headline News" — and was “immediately addressed.” Two weeks after the warrant was issued, New York City released it, indicating in a filing obtained by POLITICO that the debt was satisfied.

The source said Mercury’s relocation also resulted in confusion over the company’s unemployment insurance, culminating in the New York State Workers Compensation Board in July 2007 issuing a judgment, obtained by POLITICO, assessing an $8,250 fine against Mercury for failure to carry workers’ compensation insurance from March 31, 2006, through Feb. 25, 2007.

But less than three months later, the board issued a notice indicating that the “judgment has been fully satisfied.” Board spokesman Brian Keegan explained that the board rescinded the penalty after determining that Mercury had carried the appropriate insurance since it began doing business in New York in 2005 and that Mercury’s insurance carrier had merely failed to submit proof of coverage to the board.

In the case of the Texas filings, Mercury registered to do business in Texas in 2008, but for a handful of months last year was listed by the state’s comptroller of public accounts as “not in good standing” because it had “not satisfied all franchise tax requirements.” In November, though, the comptroller issued Mercury a certificate of good standing indicating that there were “no franchise tax reports or payments due at this time.”

The source with knowledge of the situation explained the issue resulted from Mercury’s accountants filing a simplified state tax form for 2008. They were later informed that the company was ineligible to use the form because it had gross sales of more than $10 million nationally. “So the 2008 numbers were refiled using the correct form and the issue was resolved,” said the source.

The compliance issues in Texas and New York arose during periods of rapid expansion of Beck’s earning power and influence, which today are perhaps unrivaled on the conservative side of the media spectrum, thanks to legions of passionate Beck followers who at his urging formed hundreds of political organizing groups across the country and turned out by the tens of thousands — some with “Beck for President” signs — to protests he helped inspire against the Obama administration.

In addition to his broadcasting and publishing, Beck maintains a 5-million-visitor-a-month website with an online store hawking hats and T-shirts emblazoned with Beck’s name, likeness and logo and slogans such as “Bitter typical white person clinging to God and my guns” (an allusion to an Obama campaign gaffe that inflamed conservatives).

According to its website, Mercury has a hand in all of Beck’s endeavors, which, according to a June entry in Forbes Magazine’s “2009 Celebrity 100” list, yielded an estimated $23 million in revenue in the preceding year.

Fox News has soared to new heights with Beck as a leading horse in its hard-right stable of commentators, but it’s also endured an advertiser boycott of his show and been drawn into high-profile spats with the White House, liberal commentators on rival MSNBC and environmental groups, among other targets of Beck’s wrath.

In fact, Mercury’s tax issues were first brought to POLITICO’s attention by a Democratic opposition researcher, Robert Moore of Innovative Research Group, who declined to say if his interest in Beck was on behalf of a client.

Beck has welcomed the fight, repeatedly taking on congressional Democrats and Obama administration officials, suggesting they’re disconnected from regular Americans, of whom he casts himself as a champion.

“If you're a special person, if you happen to be in the right crowd, if you happen to be in Tim Geithner's case,” he said on his Fox News show in May, “well, then, you cannot pay your taxes and they don't really bother you at all.”

The Obama nominees with tax issues have “set a poor example,” Beck said during a February Fox show, asserting, “I finally found out why liberals don't mind taxes — they ain't paying them.”