Mazi Melesa Pilip revises disclosure documents, removes nearly $90,000 in income
Mazi Melesa Pilip, the Republican candidate in the Feb. 13 special election in the 3rd Congressional District. Credit: Howard Schnapp
Republican congressional candidate Mazi Melesa Pilip made significant revisions to the personal financial disclosure she filed last week, removing nearly $90,000 in income from her husband’s medical practice, adding tens of thousands of dollars in stocks and other assets and tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
The revisions were filed with the House clerk’s office late Friday, after Newsday on Thursday had published a story on Pilip’s initial filing for the Feb. 13 special election to replace expelled GOP Rep. George Santos.
Most of the changes involve Pilip’s role in her husband Adalbert Pilip’s medical practice, New York Comprehensive Medical Care, where Pilip has said she worked as operations director.
Pilip's initial House disclosure, dated Jan. 10, listed a $50,000 salary from the Smithtown practice each in 2022 and 2023, in addition to Pilip’s $80,000 salary as a Nassau County legislator.
Pilip campaign spokesman Brian Devine told Newsday on Sunday the first filing was inaccurate, and that Pilip, as indicated in the revised report, didn’t draw a salary from the practice in 2023 and made only $13,472 there in 2022, her first year as a county legislator.
Devine didn't answer questions about how the errors were made or why the revised filing indicated that Pilip still drew income from her husband's practice in 2022. He said Pilip had stopped working there in 2021.
The new filing also clarifies that the medical practice, valued between $1 million and $5 million, is solely owned by Adalbert Pilip. The initial disclosure left unclear whether the asset was jointly or individually owned. Her new filing listed the owner as “SP,” or spouse. Each of the forms listed investment proceeds from the company of between $100,001 and $1 million in each of the past two years.
House financial disclosures require that assets and liabilities be reported only in broad ranges.
“The report that was electronically filed on the 10th of January was a preliminary draft that was inadvertently submitted prior to final review by Mazi’s financial team,” Devine said in a statement. “A review of that draft by members of the financial team resulted in the amended financial report.”
The revised disclosure added several other assets not on the first report. They include a state pension of between $1,001 and $15,000 that Mazi Pilip is earning credits toward as a county lawmaker, along with $51,001 to $115,000 in stock owned by Pilip and her husband in Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions Inc., a supplier of A.I. and robotics hardware and software.
Pilip, a registered Democrat from Great Neck, reduced the value of her bitcoin investments from $65,000 to $150,000, to $16,000 to $65,000. She also reduced the estimated value of the couple’s joint bank accounts from $50,000 to $100,000 on the initial disclosure, to $15,000 to $50,000.
For liabilities, Pilip’s first disclosure revealed an income tax debt of between $100,001 and $250,000 incurred with the Internal Revenue Service last April. Candidates don’t have to disclose such debt, but Devine said last week that Pilip listed it “out of an abundance of transparency.”
The updated report notes what Devine told Newsday last week — that the debt has since been paid.
The amended filing newly discloses personal credit card debt of Pilip's of between $10,000 and $15,000 along with Adalbert Pilip’s medical school student loan debt of between $50,001 and $100,001.
Pilip and former Rep. Tom Suozzi, of Glen Cove, are running in the 3rd Congressional District to fill the remaining term of Santos, who fabricated large parts of his biography and was charged with filing false financial disclosures that grossly misrepresented his earnings and assets.
Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Washington, D.C., nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center, said Sunday the Santos scandal “revealed that financial disclosure discrepancies may be the first warning sign that a candidate is not who they seem.”
However, Payne noted that Pilip amended her disclosure quickly, “which is expected if a new filer made honest mistakes.”
But post-Santos, “all candidate financial disclosure statements should be placed under a microscope,” said Payne, a former Office of Congressional Ethics deputy counsel who regularly reviewed financial disclosures.
Suozzi, whom Democrats have nominated to run in the special election, filed revised financial disclosures during his three terms in Congress, from 2017 to 2022.
Some revisions came after the House Ethics Committee launched a probe into Suozzi’s alleged failure to properly report approximately 300 financial transactions. According to the federal STOCK Act, members of Congress must report stock trades within 45 days of the transaction.
Suozzi said he reported those trades, but only in his year-end House financial disclosure reports, several of which were amended after the original initial filings, records show.
The Ethics Committee ultimately cleared Suozzi for the stock transactions.
Suozzi filed his 2023 candidate financial disclosure on Friday. He reported investments valued at between about $4 million and $6 million. Suozzi disclosed he earned more than $650,000 in salary and board and consulting fees in 2023, his first year back in the private sector after he relinquished his House seat for what became an unsuccessful campaign for governor.
The bulk of those earnings came from consulting fees, Suozzi said.
Newsday also has filed a Freedom of Information Law request for Pilip's Nassau County financial disclosure form, but the county has not yet provided it.
Paul LaRocco is a reporter on the investigations desk. Since starting at Newsday in late 2010, he has also covered Nassau and Suffolk county politics and government and the Town of Oyster Bay.
