When Senate Finance Committee investigators got the file eight months ago on a top Treasury appointment, Lael Brainard, they went to work.

They looked at late real estate taxes on a property in Rappahannock County, Va. including a $44.12 penalty for late payment of 2007 taxes on a Dodge pickup truck.

They looked at the immigration status of her household help, including I-9 forms on immigration status that the committee thought had suspicious time lags between signatures.

And they looked at whether her home office deduction was appropriate, based on the size of her home -- listing the square footage of each room in a committee document released Wednesday.

In the end, the committee did not recommend that she re-file any of her taxes, and concluded that her household employees had legal status. And that means Brainard is likely heading for a confirmation hearing sometime soon, to become Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.

The scrutiny is just one more example of the pitched Washington personnel battles that go on in an age of micro-vetting -- one of the reasons why it has taken the Obama administration so long to get fully staffed.

But the reason all this took eight months is in hot dispute. Brainard's camp says the Senate vetters were obsessed with minutia that has nothing to do with her qualifications.

"Ms. Brainard has always paid her taxes, has never been asked to amend their tax returns, and there is nothing in the record that in any way could be considered to call into question her qualifications or ability to carry out the duties of this position," said Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams, who urged the Senate to confirm her.

A Senate source, on the other hand, says "it took so long because we were not able to get clear consistent answers from the nominee." The Senate source says Brainard provided several different answers to the same questions over the course of 10 rounds of back and forth with the committee.

"We're not trying to play 'gotcha' with this stuff, we're just trying to determine what's actually real. We've got other things to do up here," this source said.

The Senate source said the most concerning aspect of the vetting was Brainard's answer of "yes" to a question on a standard tax form given to all nominees. The question read, "Were all your Federal, State, local, and other tax returns and tax liabilities current (filed and paid) as of the date of your nomination. If not, provide details."

But it turned out that Brainerd and her husband, Kurt Campbell (who was confirmed by the Senate to be assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in June) had not yet paid property taxes on their property in Rappahannock, and didn't pay them until September -- ten months late. A committee report noted that Brainard said she had been unaware of the oversight at the time she filled out the nomination form.

On Wednesday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) pronounced himself satisfied that Brainard had passed the vetting exam. "Ms. Brainard has taken the steps necessary to fix the discrepancies in documents submitted to the committee," Baucus said. "We intend to move forward as soon as possible on this nomination, to bolster the efforts at Treasury and strengthen America's recovery at home and abroad."

But the committee's ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), took a more skeptical tone. "This nomination took a long time to process because it took so many rounds of questions to try to get complete answers from the nominee,' Grassley said. "The dollar amounts involved aren't large compared to some other administration nominees this year, but the lack of candor, accuracy and timeliness in addressing the issues has been discouraging."