Senator Seven Car Pileup

Two of the busiest freeways in the Twin Cities, I-35W and I-694, bisect Minnesota Senate District 50. Things get complicated where the two freeways meet and it's quite common to see traffic accidents and occasional roadside carnage in the area. It's an apt metaphor for Satveer Chaudhary, the man who holds that SD50 seat, whose life increasingly resembles a multi-car crash:

The Minnesota state senator who pushed through last-minute legislation for Fish Lake that contributed to the governor’s veto of a major fish and game bill is the subject of a federal tax lien for $252,000 in past-due income taxes, the News Tribune has learned.

Sen. Satveer Chaudhary, DFL-Fridley, and his wife, Denise, failed to pay $100,000 in income taxes in 2007 and $151,000 in 2008, according to tax records.

That's a lot of scratch and the IRS doesn't tend to be especially forgiving when a person owes that much money. Now, there has to be a logical explanation for this sort of liability, right? Reporter Brandon Stahl of the Duluth News Tribune relays Chaudhary's latest travails:

Chaudhary, who owns a home on Fish Lake that would have been affected by his legislation, told the News Tribune on Thursday that the delinquent taxes were due to his wife’s wrongful termination by Celgene, a biopharmaceutical company.

“It forced her to exercise or lose some of her stock options,” he said.

“In general, she had to use some of her stocks to purchase other stocks, and so that led to a huge tax liability.”

He said his wife has filed a wrongful termination suit against Celgene with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that everything Chaudhary says here is true. That would be a tough hop and certainly would explain a huge tax liability for a given year. But it only explains the events of 2008. What about the $100,000 liability for the previous year, 2007?

[Chaudhary] said he didn’t know the reason for the 2007 tax delinquency and was checking with his accountant to learn more.

Now, I don't know about you, but if a tax liability of $100,000 were at issue, I'd be quite clear about where it came from and what the disposition of the money was. One has to assume that Sen. Chaudhary signed his 2007 tax form and you'd like to think he reviewed his accountant's work on it. I would also hope that he paid a little more attention to pending legislation than he apparently did with his own personal tax returns.

One other thing — while we're always warned that correlation doesn't equal causation, it's reasonable to wonder whether a $252,000 IRS lien might have entered into Chaudhary's thinking when he got involved in legislation that would have had the effect of raising the value of one of Chaudhary's greatest assets, his home on Fish Lake.

I hope that Chaudhary's accountant has a plausible explanation, because the Senator may have to account for himself in about a month's time.