Tax Lawyer's Blog

Tim Geithner is Barrack Obama’s Treasury Secretary-Elect and as such, if his appointment is confirmed, will oversee the Internal Revenue Service.

But, according to the Associated Press, Mr. Geithner either intentionally disregards the tax laws or, perhaps even worse, doesn’t understand them:

The disclosure Tuesday that [Obama's] choice for treasury secretary, New York Federal Reserve chief Timothy Geithner, failed to pay $34,000 in taxes and employed a housekeeper without proper immigration papers was another jarring distraction just days before Obama’s inauguration — and raises fresh questions about his team’s judgment, vetting procedures and political sensitivities.

And this isn’t the only Obama financial advisor to have tax problems. The Obama campaign’s finance manager, Martin Nesbitt, had several outstanding liens filed against him and companies owned and/or operated by him.

The Geithner news comes on the heels of Bill Richardson’s, Commerce Secretary-Elect’s, withdrawal after it was announced that he was under investigation for his own Blagojevich-style “pay to play” scandal as Governor of New Mexico:

The jarring bumps in the road to Obama’s inauguration are “really quite stunning for a transition team that has so carefully studied everything that might go wrong, and which was faultless up until about a week ago,” said Stephen Hess, an authority on presidential transitions at the Brookings Institution.

The disclosures on Richardson and Geithner are “stunning news,” Hess said. “And coming so close to the inauguration, it’s harder to put the pieces back together.”

Observation: Some of the folks who now defend Mr. Geithner (it was a simple mistake) are the same scoundrels who unmercifully pilloried Sarah Palin for failing to report per diem payments she had received from Alaska.

Joe Kristan has a great blog post about the Geithner tax fiasco at Evil or Stupid.

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