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Cagey18 -> RE: Thoughts on Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary? (1/15/2009 10:46:51 PM)
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Clearly it was not a case of simply "forgetting" to pay:
quote:
Geithner’s Mistake on Tax Is Common, Experts Say
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
The question being asked around Washington on Wednesday was this: Shouldn’t the man chosen to run the United States Treasury — which oversees the Internal Revenue Service — have had a better understanding of what taxes he owed?
The Senate Finance Committee disclosed Tuesday that the Treasury nominee, Timothy F. Geithner, had failed to pay more than $34,000 in taxes for Social Security and Medicare when he was a senior official at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003, including a small payment in 2004 after he left.
Mr. Geithner acknowledged that he received all of the paperwork, according to committee documents. And he is familiar with payroll taxes, because he has paid them for household employees in the past, as well as for his personal consulting business.
Still, several tax experts said, it is an easy mistake for an employee of an international organization to make.
“This is not your normal situation between an employer and an employee,” said Saul Brenner, a tax partner at Berdon, an accounting and advisory firm. “Did he make a mistake? Absolutely. But it appears that both he and his accountant made a mistake.”
American companies and their employees typically split payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare: each pays 6.2 percent of the employee’s gross income to cover the Social Security piece, along with an additional 1.45 percent for Medicare.
But the I.M.F. is a tax-exempt organization. Its employees who are not American citizens do not owe these taxes. Still, I.M.F. employees who are American citizens must pay these taxes, just as if they were self-employed.
Self-employed individuals are responsible for paying all of the taxes on their own, and must file an additional form with their 1040 tax return when they do so. The I.M.F pays its employees a tax allowance every three months that covers the employer’s portion of the taxes, and routinely provides employees with a quarterly breakdown of that allowance.
The Senate documents said that Mr. Geithner had prepared his own taxes in 2001 and 2002. However, an accountant reviewed his 2001 return and also failed to catch the mistake. In 2003 and 2004, he used an accountant who advised him that he was exempt from self-employment taxes.
The I.R.S. has noted that many employees of international organizations, including foreign embassies and consular offices, have made mistakes in filing their taxes. For example, an I.R.S. notice in 2006 said that up to half of such employees had incorrectly filed their tax returns, making errors like failure to pay self-employment taxes. The I.R.S. offered a one-time settlement to resolve these issues.
“There was so much confusion about these and related rules that the I.R.S. offered a settlement initiative,” said William Massey, senior tax analyst in the tax and accounting unit of Thomson Reuters. “The error is not uncommon, as the statutory provisions governing this situation are very convoluted.”
“I have read that he relied on his accountant and that could have been an easy mistake for the average accountant to make given the complexity of the code sections involving exceptions to exceptions,” Mr. Massey said.
The Senate documents indicated that Mr. Geithner had used tax software in the past, but did not make clear whether he had used it in 2001 and 2002 to prepare his returns. Even if he had used the software in those years, tax experts said the software would probably not have warned him that he was making a mistake.
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