By: jackie.sauter

Last year, like thousands of Americans, I downloaded the freeware version of TurboTax to help me file my returns.

This morning, a Senate Committee gave the green light for the confirmation of TurboTax user Timothy Geithner, former IMF employee and head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as Treasury Secretary of the United States of America.

Geithner has been the subject of intense scrutiny and a very many hard questions because he failed to pay about $34,000 in federal income taxes while he was at the IMF, which, because it’s an international organization, requires some of its charges to pay their own income taxes, rather than taking them directly out of their paychecks. In one of the hearings, Geithner admitted that he made the mistakes on his returns despite using TurboTax’s assistance.

Literally 10 minutes after reading about Geithner’s committee approval, I got a message in my Gmail inbox urging me to “Get Money Fast!” by using TurboTax again this year. “W-2s are arriving and soon you should have everything you need to finish your taxes,” the message read. Convenient, I thought, because my boss just came by desk yesterday with my W-2. If only it had been so simple for Timmy Geithner.

But more interestingly, this must be a total PR coup for TurboTax — free publicity in hundreds of newspapers and on hundreds of websites and blogs, including this one. The man who will be in charge of the IRS trusts TurboTax to “e-file” his returns! But then again, he screwed up! How could a man who presumably knows more about income tax than anyone in the country screw up his personal accounts, especially while using TurboTax?

Will Geithner’s gaffe do good things or bad things for TurboTax? Are you more or less likely to use it, or another, similar web-based service, to file your returns this year, given that the Secretary of the Treasury used it, but still made mistakes? No one, after all, wants to get audited.

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer