Sunday, May 04, 2008
Tax evasion Republican style
Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.All very simple, you don't cheat on your own taxes, your CPA will find a way for you to pay less in taxes than your secretary. No, you screw your employees out of their future benefits by pretending they work for a foreign company, then pay yourself based on the juiced up profits those unpaid tax dollars appear to be. And along the way you help make Medicare and Social Security look bad. The free market hand of Dick Cheney
More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.
The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.
But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
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