Mnuchin calls failure to disclose $100M in assets an ‘oversight’

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Treasury Department says his initial failure to disclose $100 million in assets was an “unintentional” oversight.

Steven Mnuchin on Thursday told the Senate Finance Committee that revised documents he filed with the committee a day earlier showed the additional assets, and blamed the complexity of nominee paperwork for those assets missing initially.

“As you all can appreciate, filling out these government forms is quite complicated,” he said. “The paperwork … was quite a job.”

{mosads}Mnuchin said the oversight occurred because he was working to get his financial disclosure and other information to lawmakers as quickly as possible, calling his original 43-page disclosure a “preliminary questionnaire.” Most of the millions in assets Mnuchin added later on were various homes the hedge fund manager owned.

“Any oversight was unintentional,” he added.

Mnuchin also defended his position as a director of Dune Capital International, an entity based in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven.

He argued that setting up an entity on the island, where there were no employees or clients, was done at the behest of clients seeking to minimize taxes and not to lower his own tax bill.

“I did not use a Cayman Island entity in any way to avoid taxes for myself. I paid U.S. taxes on all that income, so there was no benefit to me in the Cayman entity,” he said. “They were merely an accommodation to pension funds and nonprofit institutions.”