There are a few similarities between former Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne and Tom Daschle, the former Senate Majority Leader.
Both Jenne and Daschle are Democrats who failed to pay their taxes and are accused of taking improper gifts. And neither of them will be serving in President Obama’s cabinet.
There is one big difference between the two: Daschle won’t be spending 10 months in federal prison.
Daschle, who was slated to act as the White House health czar and to lead the Health and Human Services Department, filed amended returns and submitted nearly $140,000 in payments to the federal government last month.
Daschle walks free; Jenne got shafted
Today, he withdrew his pending nomination at his own leisure.
Ken Jenne submitted $46,000 in back payments and then served ten months of his one year and one day federal prison sentence.
Why does one man’s failure to pay his taxes amount to no more than an “embarrassment,” while another’s failure amounts to a crime?
The New York Times reported that Daschle voluntarily discovered and disclosed his erroneous tax liabilities.
Still, the mistake of one man is strikingly similar to the felony of another. Both men failed to pay income tax on cars that business associates provided to them.
According to a document prepared for the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Daschle amended his tax returns to show “unreported income from the use of a car service in the amounts of $73,031, $89,129 and $93,096 in 2005, 2006 and 2007, respectively.”
Leo Hindery, Jr., founder of the private equity firm InterMedia Advisors, provided a free car and driver to Mr. Daschle, who – coincidentally – also happens to be the chairman of InterMedia’s advisory board.
In a financial disclosure statement filed with the Office of Government Ethics, Daschle reported that he had received from InterMedia more than $2 million in consulting fees and $182,520 in the form of “company-provided transportation.”
Jenne failed to report as income use of a 1994 Mercedes E320 convertible that his law firm, Conrad, Scherer and Jenne, provided to him. The firm paid about $61,000 in 1997 for the car, but with finance charges and insurance, the firm ultimately paid about $110,000 on Jenne’s behalf.
Jenne never reported those payments on his income tax returns or on state ethics disclosure forms. He also confessed to not paying taxes on income he accepted from vendors that conducted business with the Broward Sheriff’s Office and from his former law firm.
Likewise, Daschle failed to report consulting income of $83,333 on his 2007 tax return and, from 2005 to 2007, overstated the deductions to which he was entitled for charitable contributions. He reduced those deductions by $15,000 on his amended return. Under his consulting agreement with InterMedia, Daschle received $83,333 a month.
According to the Times, “an administration official said Daschle’s failure to pay the taxes was ‘a stupid mistake.’” The official also stated that Daschle should not be penalized because he had discovered the tax liability himself, which he paid and promptly disclosed to the Senate Finance Committee.
And therein seems to lie the difference: Daschle’s self-discovery and disclosure apparently absolve him of criminal liability and exonerate him of any real criminal intent. He may have robbed the treasury but it was by human error and only temporary. All’s well that ends well, right?
Why then, was Jenne not allotted the same free pass as Daschle? After all, his public service career, like Daschle’s, was long and unblemished, until federal investigators threatened to send him away for 35 years. Daschle owned up, but only after he was nominated to serve as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So, what gives?
Daschle is a Democrat in Obama’s inner circle. Jenne was a Democrat in Bush country and his conviction was a political hit. His insistence on upholding rule of law and refusal to allow Republicans to stop the Broward recount in 2000 put him in the crosshairs of the partisan Bush Department of Justice.
He cut a plea deal because, actual guilt or innocence aside, he was on the receiving end of a threatened 35 years of prison time. Only an insane man would defend his innocence in the face of such odds.
Daschle, meanwhile, was almost awarded two cabinet positions even after the revelations about his tax issues went public.
This is not to say that Jenne is some sort of saint. He isn’t. The point is that the federal government’s disparate treatment of two strikingly similar incidents is reproachable.
If Daschle is guilty of no more than a “stupid mistake,” then Ken Jenne is innocent of tax evasion.
2 Comments until now.
Your logic is faulty as it seems the Sheriff had a connect to his public office, vendors doing business and his recieving “gifts” or imcome with that connect is a very different matter than Mr. Daschle, who was a private person at the time, recieving a benefit from his employment. There was no improper gifting at all.
Amending tax returns is a method of correcting a return — that is what Mr. Daschle did. Maybe public corruption is something you think is less a problem than private errors? The law is the law and it appears both men paid their penalty appropriately under the law.
Re: John
The Daschle problem is about more than just paying late taxes. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Senate Finance Committee was planning to ask Daschle “whether he improperly took gifts of value from charities with which he was involved.” This stems from his taking free flights on the dime of a tax-exempt charity, EduCap.
Additionally, he apparently didn’t declare $83,333 that he was paid by InterMedia in 2007.
Maybe these are all the result of human error, but I’m struck by how many “mistakes” Daschle made.
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