Social Security Post Nominee Has Zoe Baird Tax Problem

President Clinton’s candidate for Social Security Administration commissioner failed to pay Social Security taxes for a part-time baby-sitter from 1969 to 1975, the White House acknowledged Tuesday.

Clinton late Tuesday officially announced his intention to nominate Shirley Sears Chater, president of Texas Woman’s University in Denton and a nurse by training, as Social Security commissioner.

“We don’t believe this is an obstacle to her nomination,” White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said of Chater’s failure to pay Social Security taxes. “This is something that happened nearly 20 years ago and she is current.”

The payment issue has been a controversial one since Zoe Baird, Clinton’s first nominee for attorney general, was doomed by her failure to pay taxes on her domestic help.

A Democratic congressional aide said Chater’s failure to pay Social Security taxes could be a problem for someone who seeks to run an agency that will distribute $300 billion in Social Security retirement and disability benefits.

Senior citazens’ advocates also have said they were disturbed by news that Chater and new acting Commissioner Lawrence H. Thompson, who was appointed last month to the agency’s No. 2 post, both have “Zoe Baird problems.” Thompson only recently paid back Social Security taxes for his domestic help, a Health and Human Services Department spokesman said.

There was no immediate reaction from Capitol Hill. Chater’s nomination would go to the Senate Finance Committee, whose chairman, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), has criticized the Administration for not filling the post.

Myers said that from 1969 to 1975, Chater employed “a number of different domestic help people that would come in (and) did not pay Social Security taxes on them since she had a number of different ones.”

Chater, however, only owed Social Security taxes on one of those employees, a part-time baby-sitter who later became full-time in 1975. Chater began paying Social Security taxes on the employee then, and recently paid back taxes on the employee for her work during the first half of the 1970s.