MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry Facing IRS Tax Lien

The Internal Revenue Service has filed a $70,000 tax lien against Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor at Wake Forest University and host of an eponymously titled cable TV news and talk show on MSNBC.

The notice was filed earlier this month in Winston-Salem, N.C., according to the Winston-Salem Journal, against Harris-Perry and her husband James Perry.

Harris-Perry told the newspaper that she did not know of the tax lien but was aware of the debt. She claimed her husband had paid $21,721 of the delinquent taxes when the couple filed their return on April 15 and were working to pay off the remaining $48,581 owed on their 2013 taxes. But they were dealing with a series of personal crises that had delayed their efforts. She said the couple is on a payment plan with the IRS.

Harris-Perry, 41, is a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem and formerly taught at Princeton, Tulane and the University of Chicago. She was a regular guest on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC and frequently filled in for Maddow as a guest host until she began to host her own show on the cable TV channel on weekends, sometimes criticizing Republican tax cut plans, as in the clip below from her show last Sunday.

“Filing and paying taxes is not fun, but it’s part of being an American,” she said in the clip. “But some are so offended by the idea of taking a portion of our individual resources and pooling them together to do things like build roads and provide public education that they make cutting taxes their one and only solution to all social, economic and political problems they encounter.”

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