The Senate Finance Committee today cleared the nomination of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary despite unhappiness over his mistakes in paying his taxes.
The committee approved the nomination on an 18-5 vote, sending it to the full Senate for a vote either Friday or next week. President Barack Obama is hoping for quick approval so that the point man for the administration’s economic rescue effort can begin work.
The committee vote came a day after Geithner appeared before the panel to apologize for what he called “careless mistakes” in failing to pay $34,000 in taxes earlier in the decade, when he worked at the International Monetary Fund.
Geithner paid the back taxes plus interest for the years 2003 and 2004 after being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. But he did not pay taxes he owed for 2001 and 2002, even though he had made the same mistakes for those years, until shortly before he was nominated by Obama last November to be treasury secretary.
The nomination was expected to win approval by the full Senate, with many lawmakers saying that given the serious economic crisis facing the country, the new president deserved to have the services of a man of Geithner’s abilities and experience.
Geithner has been the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the past six years and was a key participant in decisions made by the Bush administration to deal with the worst financial crisis to hit the country since the Great Depression. (AP)
