According to a Sunday report by News & Observer of Raleigh, the Carteret County tax supervisor has said that former North Carolina governor, Mike Easley, was one of the buyers of property whose price was exaggerated in tax records.

As per reports, a 25 percent discount was extended to Easley and his wife, Mary, on a waterfront lot in the Cannonsgate gated community, from the Charlotte-based R. A. North Development. The coastal developer has been named in a lawsuit in which 200 plaintiffs alleged that they had been hoodwinked into paying inflated prices for coastal lots.

Though there have been no claims about the Easleys intentionally helping increase the prices that others paid, News & Observer said that the $137,000 discount that they received was not recorded in the purchases price of $550,000 reported to the Carteret County Register of Deeds.

Nonetheless, generalizing the situation in a recent interview, the Carteret tax supervisor noted that as a result of an overstatement of the price for land in public documents, the appraisals for other lots can become "distorted."

Expressing a similar opinion, S. Jill Pisner, a Virginia lawyer of a firm that filed the first of the lawsuits, said: "When you have all these politically connected players and they are setting up pricing that is not reflected in the records, how are my clients ever going to get a fair market price?"