WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to run the Treasury Department disclosed publicly Tuesday that he failed to pay $34,000 in taxes from 2001 to 2004, a last-minute complication that Senate Democrats tried to brush aside as a minor bump on an otherwise smooth path to confirmation.
Timothy Geithner paid most of the past-due taxes days before Obama announced his choice in November, according to files released by the Senate Finance Committee. He had paid the remainder of the taxes in 2006, after the IRS sent him a bill.
The still-unpaid taxes were discovered by Obama’s transition team while investigating Geithner’s background. Obama’s staff told senators about the tax issues Dec. 5.
Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus said he still hoped Geithner could be confirmed on Inauguration Day. “These errors were not intentional; they were honest mistakes,” Baucus said after he and other committee members met privately Tuesday with Geithner.
Republican senators did not immediately comment.
After senators met with Geithner, the panel released 30 pages of documents detailing his tax errors — and also how he came to employ a housekeeper whose legal-immigrant work status had briefly lapsed in 2005.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dismissed the events as “a few little hiccups.”
Geithner, plucked from his job as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to serve as Obama’s Treasury secretary, said he didn’t know he owed self-employment taxes when he worked for the International Monetary Fund.
He failed to pay self-employment taxes for money he earned while working for IMF from 2001 to 2003, according to materials released by the Senate committee. In 2006, the IRS notified him that he owed $14,847 in self-employment taxes and $2,383 in interest from 2003 and 2004, which he paid after an audit. The IRS waived penalties for those tax years.
Transition officials discovered last fall that Geithner also had not paid the taxes in 2001 or 2002.
He paid $25,970 in back taxes and interest for those years several days before Obama announced his choice, the committee documents showed.
