Katie Trottier of Minneapolis turned to Whistleblower when she couldn’t persuade U.S. Bank to forgive overdraft fees charged to her after a thief drained her checking account. Whistleblower reporter Lora Pabst described the bank’s change of heart when confronted with the facts. In the Sunday Whistleblower column, I described how Vivian Mason, a Minneapolis park commissioner from 1997 until 2005, was taken aback when she learned that memorials aren’t forever in the City of Lakes parklands. Her endowment of a bench in memory of her late husband Jack came with a time limit, and the cost of renewal was rising 150 percent, as part of a new plan to use the tributes to cover the park board’s maintenance costs and to raise money for the park system’s foundation. Whistleblower will check back in with Mason to see if the bench by Cedar Lake gets a new benefactor.

Whistleblower reader Lewis Strong wanted to know what happened to all of the stuff that state revenue agents seized last week from a Burnsville car audio business to satisfy a whopping tax debt. Strong’s question was well timed, because the Minnesota Department of Revenue has been eager to discuss its crackdown on Bass Zone Inc., the closed Minneapolis car audio business that was the state’s top sales tax scofflaw.

Contrary to earlier reports that described them as separate businesses, the revenue department established through subpoenaed documents that BZ3 in Burnsville is liable for Bass Zone Inc.’s tax debts, said Terri Steenblock, director of the agency’s collections division.

“We did seize all the inventory from that location,” Steenblock told me, including the “personal property” of Bun Chhein Om and his businesses, Bass Zone Inc. of 420 E. Lake St. and BZ3 of 2613 W. Hwy. 13 in Burnsville. It was the biggest seizure in Steenblock’s five years in her position, and possibly longer. The state’s still figuring out the value of the rims, speakers, amplifiers, installation accessories, under-the-vehicle lights, video-equipped headrests and other merchandise, as well as a 2003 Lexus.

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Late Friday afternoon, I got word from the state Department of Revenue that they were raiding the assets of the biggest fish on the list of revoked sales tax permits - a defunct Lake Street car audio joint called Bass Zone, Inc. that I wrote about in April. My colleague Katie Humphrey, stationed in Burnsville, went to the scene of the seizure - another car audio business, BZ3 - and produced this video, as well as contributing to this story. Stay tuned for a state of Minnesota warehouse sale for some tire rims, car speakers and a 2003 Lexus.

Fellow Star Tribune Whistleblower Lora Pabst traveled to New Prague for her inaugural Sunday column, which detailed the limits of a city’s help in dealing with problems caused by a city-hired contractor. It’s one of the recurring themes of Whistleblower: just because government is involved doesn’t mean government is responsible.

Mark Miernicki, the guy in the picture above, contacted Whistleblower as part of his vigorous campaign to hang onto the house he has lived in for 17 years. I told his story in my Sunday column (I’m only getting around to telling blog readers about it now because I was out of the office Monday and Tuesday - hence the deafening silence on the blog. Whistleblowers need a break sometimes, too). This story was my introduction to that exotic financial “product” called a negative-amortizing loan, sometimes described as a “pick-a-payment” or “payment-option” adjustable rate mortgage. Unlike conventional mortgages, in which you pay a bit of the principal each month, the principal in these loans actually goes up each month. The FDIC fact sheet on these kinds of loans warns of a syndrome called “payment shock.” “Your payments may go up a lot–as much as double or triple–after the interest-only period or when the payments adjust.”

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