Charles Rangel did a few things. Rangel owns a beachfront condo in the Dominican Republic that he rents out. In 2008, he revealed that he had failed to report the rental income from that property, about $75,000 since he had bought it, on his taxes. He’s since paid about $10,800 to the IRS for back taxes and penalties, but he might owe state taxes.
Secondly, he used his official stationary to solicit funds for the City College of New York in order to open the Charles Rangel School of Public Affairs.
Third, he rented four rent stabilized apartments in Harlem, three of which, combined, he uses as his residence, and the fourth which he used as a campaign office. This raises three ethics problems. First, by New York City law, a rent stabilized apartment has to be used as a residence, not as an office. Second, because they’re rent stabilized and below market rates, Rangel was saving about $30,000 a year in rent (which is the difference between the market rate of the apartments and the stabilized rents.) There’s some question as to whether that should be considered a gift by the landord (who has also contributed to Rangel’s campaigns). Third, for tax purposes, he was claiming his Washington, DC home on his taxes as his primary residence. By law, you can only get rent stabilization for your primary residence.
Fourth, he’s been keeping a car in the House Parking garage, and has been storing it there. That raises two problems. First, it violates House parking garage rules for a few reasons; cars aren’t supposed to be there for more than 45 days and it doesn’t have a valid registration or plates. Secondly, the IRS considers the fact that he was using the free House garage as storage instead of a garage he had to pay for, as being income, and he forgot to report that $290 a month on his taxes.
Fifth, there’s this tax loophole that says that companies whose main offices are in another country, even if they do almost all of their business in the US and are owned by American citizens, are exempt from federal taxes. There were four companies that really benefited from this loophole by moving their offices to the Caribbean in 2002-3, the biggest of which was an oil exploration company called Nabors Industry. When this happened, Rangel was vociferously opposed, and spoke out trying to close the loophole. In 2006, Nabors Industry donated a million dollars to CCNY (see point 2), and in 2007, when the Senate tried to get a bill passed to end the loophole and make those four companies pay what they would have owed since 2002-3, Rangel, now the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, killed the bill in the House.
Sixth, in 2009, Rangel was forced to amend his 2007 financial disclosure forms to fix mistakes and disclose about $500,000 in assets that he had forgotten to disclose after a 2008 audit of his financial disclosure forms found that, in addition to forgetting to disclose that income, he had also made all sorts of mistakes and ind inconsistencies on the assets and income he had disclosed. He also seems to have failed to pay property taxes on some real estate he owned in New Jersey.
Seventh, he and some other congressmen took trips to the Carribean paid for by a group that had interests before Congress, thereby violating gift rules. The Ethics Committee found that even though he didn’t know about the source of the funding, his staff did, and he ended up having to repay his travel expenses.
Those seem to be the major ethics scandals that Rangel was caught up in.
