Here's the story.

A major political player in Washington state got a big favor from the state Department of Revenue, an insider alleges, when the state tax agency botched a $2 million assessment on his private plane.

The clock ran out on the tax bill, which had to be delivered by the end of last year. It wasn't until after the statute of limitations had expired that the agency decided that the airplane was taxable, according to Dennis Redmon, a 29-year employee of the agency.   Redmon is going public with a whistleblower complaint he has filed with the state auditor's office, calling it a flagrant example of what has become a routine occurrence at the agency in the last three years.  The tax compliance officer says as much as $35 million in taxes have been excused for taxpayers with pull at a time when the state is reeling from the worst budget trouble since the Great Depression.

A few more details for those not familiar with Washington state politics:   The article says that the beneficiary of that "botch" is a big donor to Democrats and "progressive" causes, and that there are others, similar to this donor, who have gotten similar treatment.  Oh, and the person running the department in the last two years?   Suzan DelBene, currently running for congress in my district.  (Local talk show host John Carlson called her Suzan DelMoney recently, which is unfair, but too funny not to pass on.)

This error (if it was an error) reminds me of a story from my time in Chicago in the late 1960s.  I was volunteering at a tutoring center and got to know some of the other volunteers.  One was a woman with a poor driving record, poor enough so that she was afraid she might lose her license.  One evening I heard her asking another volunteer, an attorney who was familiar with City Hall, if he could help her.   He had a very practical answer for her problem; he could ask one of the clerks to make a "mistake" and put her files into two separate folders.  That way, no one would notice that together her infractions put her close to losing her license.  (I assume that some cash might be exchanged to make this happen, but did not inquire into the details.)

I admired the ingenuity of the scheme, though I disapproved of it (but not enough to say so to my friends).  If anyone happened to put the two files together, it would just look like one of those filing mistakes that can happen in any organization.  And, I was pretty sure that enough people had access to the files so that it would be impossible to pin the "mistake" on the person who had made it.

That kind of scheme was routine in Chicago at the time, but less common here, then and now.  But perhaps we are catching up with the big cities, as so many here want us to do.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

By way of Orbusmax.