Gubernatorial counselor Charles O’Byrne failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal income taxes because he suffers from – are you sitting down? – “Non-Filers Syndrome.”
That’s what his lawyers claimed yesterday – even as they admitted that O’Byrne had previously understated his delinquent taxes-and-penalties payments by fully 50 percent.
Rather than making good on $200,000 in state and federal levies, they said, O’Byrne had actually ponied up $300,000 – virtually all of it borrowed money.
Moreover, the last payment hadn’t been made long ago, as O’Byrne originally claimed, but Tuesday.
The lawyers offered no notarized documentation of their claims, meaning that New York must take them – and much, much more – on faith.
That’s because there is no trustworthy protocol for determining independently whether O’Byrne is fit to serve as Gov. Paterson’s closest aide and counselor:
* The state inspector general is appointed by the governor, who has an interest in any probe’s outcome. This is an insuperable conflict of interest.
* The state Public Integrity Commission was demonstrated during the Spitzer Troopergate scandal to be malleable and incompetent, if not actually corrupt.
* Albany DA David Soares proved himself to be morally corrupt during that same scandal.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has no subpoena power in such cases, and the state Senate Investigations Committee has a political conflict.
O’Byrne himself seems to have been lying from the beginning – perhaps even to Paterson himself.
At yesterday’s press briefing, his lawyers – Richard Kestenbaum and Henry Berger – did their best to explain why O’Byrne hadn’t paid taxes for years. But they only dug the hole deeper.
In addition to discrepancies regarding O’Byrne’s tax bill and payment schedule, they amended the nature of his “disability.”
O’Byrne first claimed that he’d suffered bouts of “clinical depression.”
Yesterday, it became “Non-Filer’s Syndrome” – an affliction a spokeswoman for the American Psychiatric Association said doesn’t even exist.
But suppose it did. That still wouldn’t speak to O’Byrne’s fitness to serve as Paterson’s most intimate adviser.
Suppose he decided to non-file a critical veto message, or a budget bill or two?
Then what?
Let’s be frank here: Paterson is blind; he cannot read the hundreds of documents that a sighted chief executive absorbs as a matter of routine – acquiring the knowledge necessary to run the state.
Can O’Byrne be trusted to serve as Paterson’s eyes?
By his own admission, O’Byrne’s personal life is a mess.
And, again, there is no vehicle for determining whether anything he or his lawyers have said to date is actually true.
Maybe Paterson trusts him.
But there is no reason for the rest of New York to do so. Not at all.
How long before that distrust rubs off on Paterson?
O’Byrne needs to go. Now.