Performance Czar Pulls Nomination Over Tax Problems
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Taxes
Bad things come in threes, eh?
On paper, Killefer brought impressive credentials to the two jobs Obama selected her for: deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, which requires Senate confirmation, and a new White House post, chief performance officer for the entire federal government, which does not require confirmation.Killefer oversees McKinsey’s management consulting for government clients. During 1997-2000 in the Clinton administration, Killefer was assistant Treasury secretary for management. As such she was the chief financial officer and chief operating officer for the Treasury and its 160,000 employees and led a modernization of its largest component, the Internal Revenue Service.
But for nearly a month, the administration had refused to answer how its choice to make government workers more efficient and more responsive had bungled her household payroll taxes.
The AP reported that on March 7, 2005, the D.C. Department of Employment Services slapped a tax lien on her home in the tony Wesley Heights neighborhood. The local government alleged that just three years after she left the high-powered Treasury post she began to fail to pay unemployment compensation tax for a household employee. And she failed to make the required quarterly payments for a year and half, whereupon a lien for $946.69 was placed on her home.
That sum included $298 in unpaid taxes, $48.69 in interest and $600 in penalties. The lien was filed March 7, 2005, but Killefer didn’t get the lien extinguished for almost five months, not until July 29.
During that period, Killefer and her husband, an economics professor, had a teenage son and daughter, but she had two nannies and a personal assistant to run her life when she was on the road, she told Harvard business students back then.
The weird thing here is that these tax problems aren’t nearly as serious as Daschle’s or Geitner’s. But this position wasn’t as important as the other two, so it looks like Killefer was the sacrificial lamb.
What a week…
UPDATE:
Woops, I see Doug cited the same story that I did, so I’ll change the text above to provide some background.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
[...] and Human Services. This is the second Obama nominee today to withdraw from consideration. Earlier, Nancy Killefer stepped away from the nomination to be Obama’s chief performance [...]