Top Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore
Shell companies in Cayman Islands allow KBR to avoid Medicare, Social Security deductionsby Farah Stockman
Boston Globe
CAYMAN ISLANDS - 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.
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.
(Continued here. Note that KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, for which Vice President Dick Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to 2000.)
Labels: Cheney, Halliburton
Powered by Blogger
1 Comments:
KBR got the headlines, but did you see that Blackwater
also is playing some tax shenanigans.
They don’t have to pay taxes … because the security guards are Independent Contractors !
Now maybe Congress changed the rules of an Independent Contractor, but the old rule was that if you worked exclusively for one company and took direction from that company, you were an employee.
Just another example of how Norm Coleman did not provide any oversight that he should have from his leadership post on the Oversight Committee.
Post a Comment
<< Home