SALNs for selective memory

An accountant climbed into Nosy Tarsee’s peaceful tree abode last week with a folder and a grudge.

In the folder were years of Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) filings, annotated, cross-checked against Securities and Exchange Commission records, and stitched together into a pattern too consistent to be accidental. The timing is delicious.

SALN honesty is exactly the question hanging over the impeachment trial of a certain Vice President, and the source wanted the wider public to see how routine the sleight-of-hand really was among the political class.

An heiress-senator — old money and older connections — ran a wellness spa registered under a name borrowed from a different faith tradition entirely. Her husband co-owned it. Neither the spa nor the hubby appeared in four straight years of her SALNs. Four other companies bearing her signature and tax ID — one for moving cargo, three sitting on holdings worth eight figures combined — never made her lists either.

A senator-turned-mayor left a hometown foundation off his SALN the year he ran it jointly with his wife, then a sitting city mayor. Two more foundations, stacked with fellow legislators as trustees, vanished from his books a few years later.

And a current Cabinet member has his own gap. His congresswoman wife sits on a children’s charity that received a fortune from her personal contributions — absent from their joint SALN.

A separate holding company traces back to her, too, except the tax ID attached to that filing belonged, curiously, to someone else entirely. A ghost signature doing the paperwork so she wouldn’t have to.

If the omissions matter enough to end a vice presidency or a Supreme Court post, Nosy Tarsee wonders aloud, why have they never mattered enough to end anything else?