Township defends its tax-challenged municipal attorney

On July 18, 2012, I wrote to Mayor Elmer "Skip" Bowman and the Lawrence Township (Cumberland County) Committee about their municipal attorney, Thomas E. Seeley, Esq., having hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal tax liens docketed against him.  I made my inquiry after learning that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had served notices of levy seizing the money that the Township owed Mr. Seeley for his legal services.  I asked the Mayor and Committee three questions:

  1. Why the Township was still paying Mr. Seeley's law firm thousands of dollars even though the levy documents apparently demanded that all of Mr. Seeley's income be given to the IRS.
     
  2. Which lawyer (hopefully not Mr. Seeley), if any, advised the Township on how to handle the levy.
     
  3. Why the Township elected to retain a lawyer who has so many legal and tax problems when many other lawyers don't have these problems.
On September 10, 2012, I received the Township's response which focused mainly on my third question. The Township stated that it is happy with Mr. Seeley's services and feels that his personal financial issues aren't relevant to his service to the Township.   As for my first question, the Township stated only that they felt that they were correctly paying Mr. Seeley and the IRS.  And, the Township didn't respond at all to my second question.

My correspondence with Lawrence Township is on-line here.  The tax levies themselves are on-line here.