If he hasn’t done so by the time this editorial reached your desk today, Treasury Secretary designee Timothy Geithner should withdraw his name from consideration. And no, it’s not simply because he made some mistakes on his tax returns or didn’t know his housekeeper’s residency status expired without his knowledge.
After reading a McClatchy Newspapers report on Geithner’s tax woes through the past decade, we believe someone who will be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service shouldn’t be allowed to tiptoe through the nomination process with the simple explanation that he made minor errors – to the tune of $48,000 – on tax returns he filed on his own.
According to the story published last week, Geithner “over three different tax years, claimed that expenses for the summer camps he’d sent his children to qualified for the child and dependent-care tax credit. This credit is for working parents with children younger than 13 who send them to preschool or after-school care. IRS documents and commercially available tax software clearly define what qualifies.”
“That’s one anyone who has kids and has filled out that form knows that it’s wrong. That’s really odd,” McClatchy quoted Paul Caron, a tax-law expert and associate dean at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
It gets worse for Geithner, lauded thusly in a New York Times story: “If [he] were a bank, he might well be considered ‘too big to fail.’”
McClatchy: “Documents that the Senate Finance Committee released suggest that Geithner also failed to pay a penalty tax for withdrawing money early from a federal retirement account. There’s a 10-percent penalty for doing that, and it’s advertised up front for tax-deferred retirement accounts. This is as basic as it gets in the world of personal finance.”
“I don’t understand how the 10-percent withdrawal penalty could have fallen through the cracks. That’s just a red flag,” McClatchy quoted Peter Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, which lobbies to simplify the U.S. tax code.
We don’t think these minor miscues should be passed by simply because, as the Times report says, “[W]ith the economy so fragile, many senators are loath to rattle financial markets by rejecting someone with Mr. Geithner’s qualifications and international respect.”
There’s no one else out there who should take the reigns of the Obama administration’s lead economic position than some ‘superstar’ former head of the New York Federal Reserve the Times describes as having “broad experience in global economics, financial regulation, currency and monetary policy”?
Withdraw your name immediately, Mr. Geithner, and look for someone with less drama during these difficult economic times, Mr. Obama. If the IRS’s new boss can’t competently fill out a tax return (or find someone else to do it), or – even worse – tried to rip off the government, he shouldn’t even be appearing before the Senate, let alone steering the country out of this economic nightmare.
