Baltimore finance department sent $2 million refund to wrong party, Inspector General reports

A series of cascading errors by Baltimore’s finance department and city vendors led the Bureau of Revenue Collections to inadvertently send the wrong entity a check for $2 million, nearly $60,000 of which has not been recovered, according to a new report from the Office of the Inspector General. The chronicle begins after a third-party vendor responsible for processing numerous city payments bungled a payment meant to satisfy a company’s roughly $1 million property tax bill, accidentally paying Baltimore on behalf of a different organization, the owner of which held about $1,600 in outstanding property tax.