BOSTON (WBZ-AM) -- The City of Boston was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for issues revealed in a recent IRS audit.
The IRS found that the city failed to deduct Medicare-withholding taxes for some employees. As a result, Boston had to pay several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes.
Mayor Marty Walsh told WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Carl Stevens that this had been a problem for a long time.
"This goes back, I think, a couple of decades, this practice in the City of Boston, back into the mid-80s," Walsh said. "Once we found this out, we made the adjustments and corrections and we ended that practice."
The city was also fined several thousand dollars because of the misuse of student activities money in the school department--something else that had been happening for decades.
"There's been different practices in City Hall that we're able to fix and end," Walsh said. "And this in the school department was not brought to my attention, which I'm certainly not happy about, until after the audit."
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Carl Stevens reports