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The financial woes coming from City Hall continue to mount....and now it’s been revealed that The City council owes over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Social Security Contributions.

A large portion of this is reportedly contributions that employees have deducted from workers salaries but have been withheld by the council. It’s actually an offence to with-hold those payments and to be honest it’s just plain chancey – but the council issued a release today saying that it is trying to pay up and that the employees’ benefits were never jeopardized.

A release issued by the council puts the blame at the doorstep of the City’s Director of Financial Services Dwain Davis. It says that he acknowledges that the council owes Social Security $364,329. Incredibly, the release says that this third of a million dollars in arrears was not brought to the attention of the Mayor or her council.

It says that the Financial Administrator met with Social Security and agreed to settle the debt between December 2008 and May 2009 – when the council collects the most revenue. The release says that between December and January, four payments have been made amounting to eighty-eight thousand dollars about a third of the debt – leaving the outstanding balance at $275,000, a cool quarter million dollars.

The council’s release stresses that at no time were benefit payments to employees jeopardized – but the truth s that has more to do with Social Security regulations – because Social Security will honor an employee’s claim even when the employer has failed to keep current with payments.

And in its defence, the council says that when it took office in 2006, it had to pay off $307,000 in arrears accumulated by the last PUP council. That’s fine and good, but if we’re not mistaken, the public’s judgment - severe as it was – was issued upon that council’s performance in 2006.