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.