Sorting fact from fiction on media's Iran strike reporting | Wu in hotseat after Boston office building owners hit with mysterious charges | Bombshell report on Trump mass deportation push |

Taxing questions: Wu administration faces scrutiny after Boston office building owners hit with mysterious tax hikes

Fighting City Hall has turned out to be a rather expensive proposition for the owners of some struggling downtown Boston office buildings.

City Hall has slapped developers and other real estate types with anywhere from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial penalties after they appealed tax assessments on often half-empty buildings, as Contrarian Boston has reported.

Now a top Boston pol has launched his own investigation to get to the bottom of the mysterious tax bill increases that some building owners have been hit with.

Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn has filed a 17F order requiring the Wu administration to cough up information on the controversial and seemingly newfound practice of penalizing property owners who appeal their tax assessments.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

“There have been a series of reports in the media expressing concerns about assessing practices in the City of Boston, specifically as it relates to the assessment of office towers,” Flynn notes in his order.

The label “ATB dispute” was affixed to the city tax records of the properties in question – short for the state’s Appellate Tax Board, the ultimate authority on tax appeals, according to Daniel Swift, a top Boston tax consultant whose sleuthing on behalf of his clients uncovered the charges.

City officials then hiked the tax assessments on the buildings in question, triggering higher tax bills.

Swift contends the penalties were hidden, noting he only spotted them when examining paper tax documents for various buildings that had been filed at City Hall.

In a recent interview with Contrarian Boston, Swift called the penalties “shocking,” saying he had never seen anything like it in all his years of work representing city building owners.

For his part, Flynn is seeking a list of all buildings that city officials have affixed the costly “ATB dispute” label to; the rules regarding the use of the penalties by city officials; and what records are kept on them.

A former City Council president, Flynn, to substantiate his request for information from the city, referred to reporting on the issue by Contrarian Boston, as well the Boston Herald and Boston Business Journal.

In that same official order, Flynn also mentions Boston’s history, in the 1970s, of over-assessing and hence overtaxing office and commercial buildings, which led to a $140 million court judgment.

In today’s dollars, that would amount to $620 million, Flynn noted.

The Boston Policy Institute has warned that the city could face the loss of anywhere from $1.4 billion in tax revenue in the best-case scenario to more than $2 billion in the worst over the next few years, amid the collapse of office tower values following the shift to remote work.

“This current dispute over assessment practices has a real back-to-the-future flavor that should be familiar and frightening for anyone who knows Boston’s history,” Greg Maynard, executive director of BPI, told Contrarian Boston.

Spin city: In the wake of Trump’s Iran strikes, mainstream media gets mixed grades when it comes to sorting fact from propaganda

Just call it a tale of two BBC stories.

The first, which aired this past weekend in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, featured an interview with an Iranian student in Tehran.

The student, who offered his full name, argued that the bombing was counterproductive and would cause even liberal elements of Iran’s opposition to the country’s rulers to rally around the flag.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The fact that the student would give his full name – in a country governed by one of the world’s most brutal governments, where dissenters are routinely killed, tortured, and imprisoned – should have immediately raised suspicions that he was potentially a government plant.