CHICAGO — House Republican Leader Jim Durkin (R-Western Springs) and State Representative and Grant Wehrli (R-Naperville) introduced legislation to make property tax vacancy fraud a Class 4 felony in Illinois. The bill is their reaction to a Cook County Inspector General finding Democrat gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker "knowingly committed fraud to avoid paying $330,000 in taxes."
“The Cook County Inspector General’s report made it very clear that J.B. Pritzker has defrauded all the taxpayers of Cook County.” said Durkin in a statement released Tuesday. “The General Assembly needs to address this issue to make sure those who commit fraud are held accountable.”
The report – leaked anonymously to the media – found that Pritzker knowingly removed all the toilets from his mansion to deem it uninhabitable in order to evade hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. This new legislation will bring forth serious criminal charges to those who think they deserve more of a tax break than the hard-working citizens of Illinois.
The legislation would need to progress through a Democrat-controlled General Assembly and be signed into law by Pritzker's opponent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner.
"Why should Mr. Pritzker, an inherited billionaire who hasn't worked a day in his life, get to save hundreds of thousands in taxes when the people of Illinois are working tirelessly just to make ends meet?" asked Wehrli. "It is clear Mr. Pritzker will only put his own self-interests above the taxpayers, and now more than ever we don't need another Democrat who manipulates the system to benefit his own pockets.
