Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

February 3, 2009 By Fausta

Daschle out

Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name as Health and Human Services secretary, The WSJ also reports that,

The IRS’s probe into EduCap is looking is looking into cash transactions involving Ms. Reynolds, the purchase of a $28 million corporate jet by EduCap, trips to Europe by Ms. Reynolds, and spending on gifts and luxuries, according to details disclosed in documents filed in a court case in Washington, D.C. The documents are exhibits in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit EduCap is pursuing against the IRS demanding the names of individuals whom the agency has interviewed for its investigation. The IRS is refusing to identify many of its sources, saying they fear legal retaliation by EduCap.

The IRS also is trying to determine why a former EduCap “security officer” made two cash deposits of $170,000 each into personal account of Ms. Reynolds at Riggs Bank in 2003, according to disclosures by the IRS in U.S. District Court. The former employee told the IRS in 2006 that he didn’t realize the money was going into Ms. Reynolds’ personal account, according to an agent’s notes filed with the court.

The Senate Finance Committee also is investigating EduCap.

EduCap describes itself on its Web site as a “non-profit education organization” with a mission of providing affordable college loans to students whose family incomes are too high to qualify for financial aid or federal student loan programs.

The IRS is probing whether EduCap’s spending for such things as the jet amount to an improper personal benefit to its executives under the tax laws governing not-for-profit organizations.

Earlier today Nancy Killefer, nominated by President Barack Obama to be the federal government’s first chief performance officer, also withdrew her nomination due to tax issues:

Ms. Killefer, 55 years old, failed to pay employment taxes on household help for a year and a half, the Associated Press reported. In 2005, the AP said, the District of Columbia filed a $946.69 tax lien on her home for failure to pay the unemployment compensation tax. The error was resolved five months later.

It remains to be seen whether the IRS will continue to prosecute Daschle to the full extent of the law, as they do “everyday folk”.

UPDATE
Tom Daschle Redefines Hypocrisy

The old Pontiac, while the limo was getting a lube?

UPDATE 2
Obama to Pick from IRS List of ‘Paid Up’ Democrats

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Democrats, taxes Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle

January 31, 2009 By Fausta

And now for Daschle – and the Google warning?

What’s with the Democrats and taxes?
There’s Charlie Rangel
Tim Geithner
Caroline Kennedy

Now, former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D

The controversy deals with a car and driver lent to Daschle by a wealthy Democratic friend — a chauffeur service the former senator used for years without declaring it on his taxes.

Never mind the corruption question for the in-kind services,

After being defeated in his 2004 re-election campaign to the Senate, Daschle in 2005 became a consultant and chairman of the executive advisory board at InterMedia Advisors.

Based in New York City, InterMedia Advisors is a private equity firm founded in part by longtime Daschle friend and Democratic fundraiser Leo Hindery, the former president of the YES network (the New York Yankees’ and New Jersey Devils’ cable television channel).

That same year he began his professional relationship with InterMedia, Daschle began using the services of Hindery’s car and driver.

The Cadillac and driver were never part of Daschle’s official compensation package at InterMedia, but Mr. Daschle — who as Senate majority leader enjoyed the use of a car and driver at taxpayer expense — didn’t declare their services on his income taxes, as tax laws require.

During the vetting process to become HHS secretary, Daschle corrected the tax violation, voluntarily paying $101,943 in back taxes plus interest, working with his accountant to amend his tax returns for 2005 through 2007.

Once he got found out,

Daschle reimbursed the IRS $31,462 in taxes and interest for tax year 2005; $35,546 for 2006; and $34,935 for 2007, a Daschle spokesperson said, adding that Daschle had asked his accountant to look into the tax implications of the car and driver five months before Obama won the presidency.

James Joyner notices

A later Tapper report, however, is more problematic:

Mr. Daschle also didn’t report $83,333 in consulting income in 2007.

The Senate Finance Committee Report also notes that during the vetting process, President Obama’s Transition Team “identified certain donations that did not qualify as charitable deductions because they were not paid to qualifying organizations. Daschle adjusted his contribution deductions on his amended returns for 2005, 2006 and 2007 to remove these amounts and add additional contributions.” This adjustment meant a reduction in the amount he contributed to charitable foundations of $14,963 from 2005 through 2007.

These two omissions are much harder to dismiss. Indeed, they look like actual tax fraud — an attempt to conceal a substantial amount of obvious income and to claim deductions to which he wasn’t entitled and which his accountant could easily have verified. He’ll need a humdinger of an explanation.

Well, at least it wasn’t pay-to-play, like Bill Richardson, Blago, Anibal Acevedo & the Philly fundraisers and Jim McGreevey.

But fear not: Jake Tapper assures us that, if Daschle doesn’t get the health and human services post, he’ll still be director of the new White House Office on Health Reform.

The fact that his wife is a lobbyist whose company “does represent numerous health interests” presents no problems at all.

And now for a side note on the Google warning:
While I was researching this post, the search daschle’s wife lobbyist yielded results which carried “This site may harm your computer” warnings, which in turn directs to a Google warning page. To get the Washington Post link I used, I had to cut & paste the link.

It reminded me of how quickly Google defused the Obama google bomb, but it’s also happening with searches involving Republicans. What’s going on?

UPDATE
Here’s the Google explanation, via Sissy,

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.

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Filed Under: Anibal Acevedo, Barack Obama, Democrats Tagged With: Caroline Kennedy, Charles Rangel, Fausta's blog, Rod Blagojevich, Tom Daschle

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