LATTA, S.C. (WBTW)-Last week, News13 told you about the town of Latta having some problems with city employees not having healthcare coverage or retirement benefits even though the money is taken out of their paychecks. But News13’s Jana Jones found out that those aren’t the only money woes the town is having.
“That infuriates me as a tax payer. The fact that I represent these people, it just makes me that much more mad.”
Jarett Taylor is a council member for the town of Latta. Council members recently learned that their small town has some big financial problems.
“If you have a paycheck and you pay state and federal taxes, the person who was in charge of translating that federal tax to the IRS was not in fact doing that.”
Jarett Taylor showed News13 some of the documents  from the IRS showing the tax penalty.
Taylor says the town currently has nine tax liabilities totaling more than $158,000.
We reached out to the mayor regarding this problem and he told News13 in a statement quote  “As long as I was in the administrative chair which was from January until June of 2014, the taxes were paid.”
But when Taylor called the IRS, he says he was told otherwise.
“Her exact words were they dated back to 2011, all of 2012, the last quarter of 2013 and the first three quarters of 2014.”
Taylor says since Latta isn’t a private entity, overcoming this deficit is going to be a problem.
“The only way to make more money is to draw industry and you’ve seen Latta, we’re not going to draw a whole lot of industry here right now or either raise taxes on the citizens of Latta and it didn’t take very long of driving around here to realize that not many people here have a whole heck of a lot of money.”
Taylor says they’ll have to be creative, making some employees carry a heavier load and make cuts where possible. But he says if any town could overcome something like this, it would be Latta.
“If there is one thing last year proved through the whole chief incident, it’s that this town pulls together when things need to get done.”
Jarett Taylor said the city has suspended jobs, and stopped employees from working overtime to deal with this problem in the short term but he says ultimately they may have to raise taxes in order to bounce back from this.