Senator Jim Justice, a Republican and former governor of West Virginia, has agreed to pay over $5m (\u00a33.9m) in long-overdue taxes, just hours after being sued by US tax authorities.<\/p>\n
The first-term senator and his wife reached the settlement following a lawsuit accusing the couple of having “neglected or refused to make full payment” on taxes from 2009. <\/p>\n
Justice, who led the state from 2017 until he took office as a senator in 2025, entered politics after decades running his family’s coal empire, which controlled dozens of mines across several states.<\/p>\n
At a media briefing in October, Justice called the tax assessment against him, which was levied in 2015, “politically motivated”. <\/p>\n
“It’s just a situation that big companies deal with all the time,” he said. “You saw all the stuff that President Trump dealt with.”<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day,” he added, “I’d say just let it be and see how it all plays out.”<\/p>\n
The BBC has contacted the senator’s office and his lawyer for comment following the settlement.<\/p>\n
In the lawsuit filed on Monday, the Internal Revenue Service said the Justices had accrued $5.16m in back taxes and interest. Under the agreement, the Justices will repay the full amount, plus additional interest. <\/p>\n
The filing did not specify a timeline for repayment.<\/p>\n
Justice, who owns dozens of businesses that include coal and agricultural operations, had a net worth of up to $1.9bn until 2021, according to Forbes’ estimation. But by 2025, Forbes estimated that had gone down to “less than zero”.<\/p>\n
The senator and his family are facing a series of other financial pressures. <\/p>\n
CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reported they are contending with $1.4m in liens (a right to keep possession of property belonging to another person until a debt is discharged) over unpaid sales taxes tied to their historic resort, The Greenbrier, and its sporting club. <\/p>\n
The IRS has also filed more than $8m in additional liens against the couple for other unpaid personal taxes, the network said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Senator Jim Justice, a Republican and former governor of West Virginia, has agreed to pay over $5m (\u00a33.9m)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-315235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}