Taxes?

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What is it about taxes and the American public?

Timothy Geithner and his accountant misinterpret the tax code, are notified of their mistake, and Mr. Geithner pays his taxes and penalties in full, yet some think this disqualifies him for the post of Secretary of the Treasury.

Nancy Killefer flubs the tax payments she should have made in regards to her household help, and withdraws her name from consideration to be Chief Performance Officer.

Then we have the case of Tom Daschle.

I didn’t have much detail, so I did some googling and found out that his sins were a little worse than either Geithner’s or Killefer’s. Not only did Daschle fail to pay tax on the use of the car – something I would consider an innocent mistake – he also failed to report income from consulting. His excuse that the company who paid him sent him an incorrect 1099 doesn’t hold water. I was a consultant once, and I knew what companies had paid me at the end of the year. If my numbers didn’t match the 1099, I looked into it, notified the company it was incorrect and got a corrected one – and I didn’t have an accountant.

As for Killefer, I have had household help and also business employees, and I can tell you that the information provided by the government to help you properly deduct taxes and deposit them with the government is pretty impenetrable. I could not afford an accountant, but I finally hired a service to do my payroll in my business – and I had only three employees!

But what does any of this have to do with whether these people were good choices for the jobs they were being considered for? I don’t have any qualms about their ethics – well, a little about Daschle’s (or at least Daschle’s accountant’s) – just because they ran afoul of the IRS (or the Washington, DC, government in Killefer’s case). My husband and I have made errors on our income taxes that have been caught at least twice. Once, we got a refund. The other time, an insignificant error had ballooned into a significant amount because it took the IRS 18 months to notify us of the error. That 1½% per month really adds up fast.

There’s just something about tax problems in the mind of the American public. For example, my father, probably the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican you’d ever meet, didn’t give up on Richard Nixon until he found out that Nixon had cheated on his taxes. A covert, political burglary, thousands of dollars in hush money, stonewalling the Congressional committee, money laundering, subversions of the Constitution – those didn’t concern him. But if a man cheated on his taxes, then he was a lowdown, Commie, unpatriotic, un-American no-good-nik.

The loss of Daschle – who now cannot serve the administration in any way – is huge. It’s hard for people not in politics to understand how important it is to have someone on your side whose calls will be taken. You see, you can’t persuade someone to your point of view or get their insight on a problem if they’re “in a meeting” every time you call. People take the President’s call, of course, but he can’t make all the calls we’ll need as we run these economic rapids.

Tom Daschle probably calls heads of state on a regular basis, even in his role as a private citizen. I’m sure there are other people who have an equally thick rol-o-dex, but Obama needs every one of them he can find and persuading them to leave uber-lucrative private life for uber-unprivate public service isn’t easy. But he’ll find some.

Let’s just hope they and their accountants have never made any mistakes on their taxes.
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