SPOKANE COUNTY-- A former Spokane County appraiser found millions of dollars in improvements, properties, and homes missing from the tax roles. She filed a whistle-blower complaint alleging potential fraud.
I continued my exclusive investigation into the assessor’s office mess after weeks of phones calls to County Assessor Ralph Baker. He finally agreed to an interview. Then just three hours before that, he had a county employee call to say he was canceling. He refused to talk about the case, he said on advice of legal counsel. So I went out to find and interview this elected official to try and get answers concerning his actions and his decisions.
I finally tracked down Assessor Ralph Baker in the hallways of the Spokane County Courthouse. The whistle-blower complaint alleged possible fraud and that at least one appraiser may have been falsifying mileage reports, collecting hundreds of dollars each time, and missing millions of dollars worth of properties to answer the complaint, the assessor’s office, in effect, investigated itself.
I asked him, "Why didn’t you have a criminal authority take care of it, like the sheriff’s office investigates or local police investigate, if this was allegations of criminal fraud? Instead you decided to investigate yourself."
Baker told me, “I beg to differ. I think the person who ran the investigation was the Human Resources Department.” Cathy Malzahn is the Director of Human Resources, but she too refused to answer any questions on advice of legal counsel.
The investigation concluded there was no wrong doing, but admitted to numerous problems within the Assessor’s Office that could have contributed to the problem. The appraiser in question had some health issues. New construction of homes may have been assigned to other appraisers. The report admits the appraiser being investigated “did miss new construction” but so did others, and for a variety of reasons, including large workloads, employee turnover and computer problems.
But people with decades of experience in the Assessor’s Office told me those explanations don’t add up. In fact, they don’t remember anyone ever missing that much property. The bulk of the investigation wasn’t done by an independent third party, it was done primarily by a single manager inside the Assessor’s Office. So in effect, the Assessor’s Office investigated itself and found nothing wrong.
I asked him, "That’s the finding of your office? That’s what we have."
Baker replied, “It’s not the findings of my office. It’s the finding of the investigator."
I asked him, "Your supervisor, the one, Hodges I think his name was, did the investigation?” Baker just paused and stared.
I asked him, "Isn’t he from your office?"
Baker said, “See now you’re getting into portion of the conversation on advice from the attorney I’d rather not talk about.”
Some employees of the Assessor’s Office say the assessor’s investigator not only knew the parties involved, he knew of and handled prior complaints about the very person he was looking into.
And Debi Mason says he did not interview many of the people she listed in her whistle-blower complaint with pertinent knowledge of possible fraud, and his report questions “whether this is a valid complaint under the whistle-blower law,” even though he is not an attorney.
We have a list of scores of homes and properties and improvements found missing from the tax roles by Debi Mason, nearly $20 million worth.
Some property owners who were originally missed by the first appraiser were notified they’d have to pay back taxes. They didn’t want to be identified but told me they knew they owed taxes and despite numerous calls and stacks of emails they gave me, to the Assessor’s Office, they couldn’t get anyone to come out and settle the evaluation.
Some had to get lawyers.
I asked Baker, “Is there anything you want to tell taxpayers here, especially property owners who had to lawyer up too?"
Baker said, “Yes, if you’ll run it. That there was no finding of wrong doing on anyone’s part.”
And Baker says if there was no wrongdoing, then there must not have been any missing properties from the tax roles either.
I asked him, “Their people owed back taxes. They admit they owed back taxes and they were trying to pay that. So why are you telling me these people didn’t owe back taxes?”
Baker said, “As far as I know.”
I said, “Are you telling me these property owners who talked to me aren’t telling me the truth?”
Baker said, “Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what they said.”
The bottom line is some local property owners had to pay a lot of money in back taxes and legal fees.
Debi Mason, the whistle-blower who found millions in properties missed by another appraiser was reassigned by Baker to work under the very person she filed the whistle-blower complaint against. Mason resigned.
The woman who allegedly failed for whatever reason to find all those properties, was promoted by Baker. And just about everyone involved in the whistle-blower investigation won’t talk about it on advice of legal counsel.
County Assessor Ralph Baker is up for re-election this year. Just two weeks ago, one of his employees, who is in the same political party, told him she was going to run against him.
She told me it was because of this and other problems in the Assessor’s Office. Plus another candidate from Spokane Valley has announced he’ll run against Baker as well.
As for Debi Mason, she’s still looking for work.
And there’s this note I found out in the wake of this investigation: the Assessor’s Office has pulled all of my records on any properties or homes I own in Spokane County. I repeatedly called the Assessor’s Office and specifically Assessor Baker to find out why they’ve pulled my personal property records. So far no one has called me back with why they did that.
