What’s Wrong With This Picture? : County officials get special perks--and then escape taxes on them

Maybe the local office of the Internal Revenue Service better get ready for a deluge. Yes, we know it’s way past the tax filing deadline. But the rest of us didn’t know about that nifty tax exemption used by members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and other top county officials. Now that the word’s out, the IRS can bet that lots of people in Los Angeles will want the same deal. And why not? County officials have shown us a novel way to avoid paying some taxes, and found a way to make somebody else pay instead.

Consider some of the notable benefits for which board members and high-ranking county employees pay no taxes. Some top county officials are chauffeured in government cars, not only on official business but on personal trips to dinners, doctor appointments and the like. As Times staff writers Richard Simon and Frederick M. Muir reported, county officials can travel in their bulletproof cars on vacations anywhere, a perk unavailable even to top officials in the White House--themselves no strangers to transportation perks. And they can use their car phones for personal calls without reimbursing taxpayers.

And how is it that they pay no taxes on these benefits? Because several years ago the supervisors tailored their security plan to qualify for an obscure tax exemption. Under federal rules, personal use of company- or government-provided cars and drivers is exempt from taxation if there is a “bona fide business-oriented security concern.” To qualify, an official must be under “specific threat of death, bodily harm or kidnaping” or must work in territory subject to terrorist activity.

As for “specific threat,” a Sheriff’s Department spokesman could find no record of threats against supervisors; a county security official whose office is notified of all such incidents said threats do not occur routinely and that “some are more viable than others.”

Is living in Los Angeles so perilous that attack is possible at any moment? If that’s so, then the IRS may have to brace itself for security exemption claims from police officers, teachers and public transit drivers, for a start. Perhaps producers, lawyers and even editors would not be far behind.

That’s absurd, obviously. But so is the fact that county officials are not paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes to support their gold-plated, taxpayer-provided security perks. Is this any way to run government?