Herman Cain has a personal reason for wanting a simpler tax code: he missed paying his Georgia state income taxes in 2006, "prompting Georgia to file a tax lien against him that wasn’t settled until late 2008," The Daily Beast's Daniel Stone reports. However, Cain probably had the best excuse possible for failing to pay his fair share: he was undergoing cancer treatment at the time. "Cain had filed with the IRS and won a six-month reprieve in paying his 2006 federal taxes as he was undergoing his treatment for stage four lymphoma and believed that filing should also have bought him time with the state of Georgia," Stone reports. A campaign spokesperson spun it thusly for The Daily Beast: "The experience serves as an example of how broken our federal and state bureaucracies are with respect to the collection of revenue." Cain, of course, has risen to the top of GOP presidential field in part through his now famous and famously simple "9-9-9" tax plan, which would rewrite the tax code to have a 9 percent federal income tax, a 9 percent corporate tax, and a 9 percent federal sales tax. The full cache of documents showing the tax lien is available over at The Daily Beast here.

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