Forty aides who serve President Barack Obama “owe $333,485 in back taxes.”
Bloggers in posts March 28
April 15 is almost here. So it is fitting that a claim about income taxes caught our attention when it appeared in the blogosphere and some media reports.
The claim: Forty aides to President Barack Obama “owe $333,485 in back taxes.”
Sounds outrageous, yes? And after checking with the Internal Revenue Service, we can affirm that the claim is factually correct. Yet there is more to the story.
It turns out that the issue arises every year, regardless of who is president. And it applies to nearly every department of the federal government.
“People who work for the federal government are no different from people who work in the private sector or for nonprofits,” said Kay Bell, a former congressional staffer and currently a contributing tax editor for BankRate.com. She has written about government employee delinquencies for years.
Let’s break this down with numbers first, then provide some context. The IRS developed a reporting method in 1992 to comply with a congressional requirement that it provide annual reports on the tax delinquencies of federal employees.
In 2011, the last year for which the filing deadline has long passed, 3.62 percent of the civilian federal workforce — or 107,658 individuals out of 2.97 million federal workers — had an unresolved federal income tax delinquency. This did not include taxpayers who have made arrangements with the IRS to pay off their tax debts. Rather, these are people who have not, cannot or will not pay.
Altogether, these tax delinquents owed just over $1 billion.
Among the major federal departments, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had the highest delinquency rate, 4.42 percent. In exact numbers, 431 HUD employees owed a cumulative $5.9 million.
Among large independent agencies, the worst tax delinquents were the workers in the Government Printing Office: 167 employees, or 7.6 percent of the agency’s workforce, owed back taxes totaling $2.3 million.
As for the White House, the Executive Office of the President had 40 tax delinquencies out of 1,902 workers in 2011, for a rate of 2.10 percent. These employees owed $333,485 altogether.
The delinquencies concern some in Congress. But guess what? The tax delinquency rates for the House and Senate exceed those of the White House.
The House, including a staff of 11,812 and 435 lawmakers, had 454 tax delinquents in 2011, owing nearly $8.9 million, giving it a 3.71 percent delinquency rate.
The Senate, with 100 lawmakers and 6,930 staff members, had a rate of 3.33 percent, with 234 individuals owing $1.9 million.
These figures trail the public’s delinquency rate of 8.2 percent, but critics such as Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, note that federal workers are paid by taxpayers. As Chaffetz told Fox News on March 20, “if they’re not going to pay their taxes, they should be fired!”
The only department that may use tax trouble as a reason for dismissal, however, is the IRS. Chaffetz would like to extend such treatment to other federal employees.
This is a lot of information about various departments, lawmakers and the White House. Yet bloggers ignored almost everything but the White House.
Consider entries such as this, in the blog named “Fire Andrea Mitchell”:
“40 of Obama’s White House aides owe a total of $333,485 in back taxes — media silent.”
The media were not silent, actually. The Associated Press had the story March 8.
The blog entries appear to build on a partial theme from a March 11 piece in Investor’s Daily Business and its website, Investors.com, by columnist Andrew Malcolm.
Malcolm wrote: “This is the third straight year that the chief executive of the United States has been unable to get his own staff members to keep up with a citizen’s legal income tax obligations to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes owed. All this while Obama has made such rhetorical hay about corporations and the wealthy paying their fair share.”
But these delinquencies have occurred every year, not just the past three under Obama.
We know this because there have been other media reports in the past. But we also know because an IRS spokeswoman provided data for every year dating to 2004.
In 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, 50 employees of the Executive Office of the President owed $812,917, according to reporting in 2009 by Bell and others. That’s a default rate of 2.93 percent. Remember, the current rate is 2.10 percent.
The lowest rate for the president’s staff during all these years was 2010 (under Obama), when it was 2.01 percent, the IRS data show. But that was also the year with the most money owed: $833,970.
The lowest amount owed by the president’s staff during all these years was $188,304, in 2007 (Bush’s staff), with a delinquency rate of 2.21. Yet in three of Bush’s last five years in office, his staff owed more than $627,000.
Putting all this together, the claim — that 40 staffers in the Obama White House are tax delinquents — is accurate. Yet it omits pertinent facts. This is neither new nor unique to this president or this branch of government.
Based on PolitiFact guidelines, when a claim is accurate but leaves out facts necessary to get the full picture, the Truth-O-Meter is to read “Mostly True.”
