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Geithner Must Go

By Larry Johnson on January 14, 2009 at 12:29 PM in Current Affairs

If Tim Geithner had been nominated as Energy Secretary I would not care. But when you are nominated to run the Department of Treasury and oversee the Internal Revenue Service and you “forget” to pay your taxes and employ an undocumented worker, there is no slack. Zero tolerance. If he is so goddamned smart then how in the world does he let something like this fall thru the cracks?

Geithner failed to pay self-employment taxes for money he earned from 2001 to 2004 while working for the International Monetary Fund, according to materials released by the committee Tuesday.

He paid some of the taxes in 2006, after an IRS audit discovered the discrepancy for taxes paid in 2003 and 2004. But it wasn’t until much later – days before Obama tapped him to head Treasury late last year – that Geithner paid back most of the taxes, incurred in 2001 and 2002. He did so after Obama’s transition team found that Geithner had made the same tax mistake his first two years at the IMF as the one the IRS found he made during his last two years there.

The panel’s report also noted that Geithner briefly employed a housekeeper in 2005 whose legal immigrant work status had lapsed.

Taken together, the disclosures cast a cloud over what otherwise had appeared to be a smooth road to confirmation for Geithner. Obama’s transition team told Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and senior Republican Charles E. Grassley of Iowa of the tax problems in early December, but most rank-and-file members of the panel only learned of them recently.

Are the Democrats posed to turn ethics and competence into the Special Olympics?

This is unacceptable people. Our nation faces an economic meltdown and we want to put a guy in charge who was told about the back taxes and forgot? Sorry. This is bullshit and the man ought to have the decency to step down before the Republicans legitimately make mince meat out of this clown.