The hits keep on coming:
Just when you thought it was impossible to find more proof of the bungling of the bailout … Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, announced this morning that his panel had found 13 of the top 23 recipients of TARP owing the government $220 million in back taxes.
Making matters worse was the fact that any company getting TARP aid had to certify to the Treasury Department that they didn’t owe back taxes before getting their share of the bailout, as Lewis explained. It appears that Treasury took the bailed-out businesses at their word rather than asking to actually see their tax records.
This was a foul-up under Bush/Paulson, but the Obama Administration needs to turn around and look at those posters that put them there.  They need to take that CHANGE a bit more seriously, or they’re going to take it on the chin. To be clear, they’re not approaching the financial sector in any fundamentally different way than did the Bush and Clinton Administrations, so it would be unfair to say that they’re any worse than what came before. But that’s not the measure they’ve set for themselves, nor is it one that anyone should be willing to let them skate on.
tx2vadem
The problem I see is that Treasury and the Fed need more people to manage these massive programs. I mean a handful of people probably just don’t have enough time in the day to accomplish a decent level of due diligence. That and they totally need to decide on a strategy and detail that to the public. They deserve the low marks they’re getting on the transparency of this process.
They can’t continue to dance around how they plan on dealing with the toxic assets. And they can’t feign shock when they save a company from default and as a result that company continues to pay its counterparties (which happen to be foreign banks and other banks receiving TARP).
MB
Quite agreed. I also hope that Geithner is looking over his shoulder at Barofsky. I don’t want that to be the big story here (and there is a risk of that, considering how many people it would benefit), but I do think that Geithner will do a better job on the whole accountability bit if he’s a little worried about his own.