New York City Council member Vickie Paladino appears to have misrepresented her personal debt on financial disclosure forms, according to publicly available records showing that while Paladino claimed not to owe any debt on her disclosure filings, she was actually nearly $20,000 in the hole.
Paladino said “no” on a 2021 filing with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board when posed with the question: “Did you owe any entity or person (other than a relative) $5,000, excluding mortgages on your primary and secondary residences, or more for a period of 90 consecutive days during 2021 or on the date you file this report?”
But the Republican Council member, who represents Whitestone, College Point and Bayside in Queens, did owe money exceeding that threshold at the time, according to records obtained by the Daily News.
A summons issued in Queens Civil Court on Sept. 9, 2020, shows that Midland Credit Management Inc. was trying to collect $6,592 from Paladino, a debt she appears to have disclosed on a candidate’s disclosure form she filed with the city for that year.
The following year, Paladino disclosed no such debt — even though records show that the debt remained active.
A Civil Court judgment dated Oct. 17, 2022, shows that the court ruled in Midland’s favor, putting the total damages owed at the exact same $6,592.01 amount, with $294 in additional costs and a 2% interest penalty tacked onto the final bill.
That isn’t the only debt Paladino appears to have neglected to report properly.
While her 2020 COIB form notes the Midland debt, Paladino did not make mention of another, larger debt owed to the Nassau Educators Federal Credit Union.
According to a separate judgment rendered in Queens Civil Court, Paladino was on the hook for $12,565 to that credit union as of March 2, 2020 — a period of time covered by her 2020 COIB filing, which makes no mention of the debt.
When asked about these discrepancies, Thomas Paladino, the councilwoman’s son and spokesman for her campaign, described them as a “minor reporting oversight” and said they “will be corrected with COIB as necessary.”
Richard Briffault, the former chairman of the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, was reluctant to speculate on what it all means when asked about the situation, but found it strange that a debt was reported on the form one year, but not listed the following year — especially given that online forms for subsequent years self-populate with data entered from the prior year.
“It’s unusual to list something for one year and not list it for the following year,” Briffault said, speaking more generally about a recurring debt that met the COIB’s reporting threshold.
Paladino, an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, has touted herself as a fiscal conservative. In February, she groused on Twitter about how the city spends money, saying at the time that “we now govern by bailout.”
“Our economic policy is now to spend to the precipice of bankruptcy, then get the Feds to bail us out, wipe the debt clean, and do it all again. Simple as that. This is why almost nobody in city government seems to care very much about sound economic policy, supporting small business, sane tax rates, or fiscal discipline — they know that no matter how much of a mess we make here, Democrats at the federal level will simply bail us out when the time comes,” she said. “It’s a truly horrible way to run a government, much less a city as important as ours.”
Paladino is up for reelection this year. She’s running unopposed in the Republican primary, but will ultimately face off against one of three Democratic challengers in this coming November’s general election. Democrats running for the spot include former state Sen. Tony Avella, former Queens Assistant District Attorney Christopher Bae and Paul Graziano, an urban planning consultant.
When contacted by The News, Avella accused Paladino of “lying” on her COIB forms and called her rhetorical stylings on fiscal matters into question.
“Vickie likes to preach about sound economic policy and maintaining fiscal responsibility, all while she has failed to manage her own finances — accruing debts, failing to pay taxes and even lying about it on her Conflict of Interest forms,” Avella said. “How can we trust Vickie, who complains that the city has mismanaged its finances, while she has failed to take personal responsibility for her own?”
Paladino’s spokesman shot back at Avella, calling him “elitist and totally out of touch with the hard reality that people in this district face every day.”
“I realize that Tony knows nothing about this, but working-class people who are raising a family, running a small business, and paying taxes and a mortgage often struggle with bills, and sometimes fall behind. It’s no secret that I have never been a wealthy person and my family faced its share of financial hardship, just like so many others,” the councilwoman said through her spokesman. “Not everyone can be a career politician living off a fat government salary and pensions their entire life like Tony Avella.”
Records show that Paladino’s debt burden hasn’t been limited to her alone over the years.
The councilwoman and her husband, also named Thomas Paladino, owed nearly $76,000 in federal and state tax liens as of two years ago. Some of that debt dated back to 2007.
Federal records show that nearly $38,000 in liens were satisfied in June 2021. And state records show a separate $38,000 in state tax warrants were settled in October 2021 — the same year Paladino was running for the Council seat she now occupies.
Paladino’s spokesman said that debt “was incurred as a result of the Council member’s husband closing his small business.”
“It was gradually paid off over the course of approximately 14 years on a payment plan, finally being fully satisfied in 2021,” he noted. “By the time we needed to report, the balance was below the reporting threshold.”
When asked to provide the outstanding balances in 2020, Paladino’s spokesman, her son, said he did not have immediate access to that information.
It does not appear that that debt needed to be reported on COIB forms.
Speaking generally about the reporting requirements around such debts, Carolyn Lisa Miller, COIB’s executive director, noted that disclosure law doesn’t require the reporting of debt incurred by a firm “in which the filer has an ownership interest when that liability by the firm is incurred in the ordinary course of business.”
But, she added, “there might be complicating factors, depending on the corporate structure of the business.”
