ATLANTA — Former Columbia County Tax Commissioner Kay Allen lost her bid for $1,300 in attorney’s fees for defending a complaint against her that was dismissed by the state campaign-finance commission.
The commission voted 3-1 Wednesday to deny her motion to order reimbursement of the fees from her former deputy, Dwight Johnson, who had filed the dismissed complaint.
Johnson filed the complaint in February with the Georgia Government Transparency & Campaign Finance Commission alleging that Allen failed to list on her personal-financial disclosure a business relationship. The Ethics in Government Act requires each candidate and public official to disclose all businesses, nonprofit positions and personal investments.
Johnson’s complaint didn’t specify what relationship Allen omitted or the document it was left off of. As a result, the Campaign Finance staff dismissed the complaint in July.
Allen had contracted with Grovetown and Harlem to collect taxes on their behalf, and she kept what she was charging them for the service. State law allowed tax commissioners to charge local governments for collecting taxes until a 2007 change prohibited it in counties with more than 50,000 parcels, unless the county commission approved. Columbia reached that size two years later, but Allen continued to charge Harlem and Grovetown without ever requesting the OK of the Columbia Commissioners.
She resigned in March, after holding the post for more than 30 years.
The law allows candidates and officials who are the subject of frivolous complaints to get attorney’s fees, but neither the law nor the Campaign Finance Commission have specified what constitutes “frivolous.”
The fact that the staff found no basis to the complaint isn’t reason enough to consider it frivolous, Finance Commission Chairwoman Hillary Stringfellow said Thursday.
“It is not a word that is defined in any rule that we have,” she said.
The commission has never awarded attorney’s fees unless both parties agreed beforehand.
Allen’s resignation brought an end to the county’s dispute over more than $160,000 in fees she was paid by the cities since 2009 for providing tax collection services. The county commissioners contend the money should have been remitted to the county.
In the settlement agreement approved by county commissioners, Allen returned half the money to the county, a total of $80,650, and submitted her resignation to Gov. Nathan Deal. The county also agreed to allow Allen to retire with her state benefits intact and to withdraw its letter to the governor seeking her removal from office.
Allen’s husband, District 3 County Commissioner Charles Allen also resigned as part of the agreement.
Over the past two decades, Kay Allen had collected thousands in additional pay for providing tax services to the two municipalities. The contracts with the cities gave her a 2 percent cut of all property taxes billed for them. In the past five years, those payments totaled more than $160,000 in direct compensation.
The payments came under the scrutiny of law enforcement after authorities were made aware of them in October 2013.
Allen acknowledged that she had collected the additional compensation and maintained that state law allowed her to do so. Other tax commissioners around the state also have such agreements, but not all.
