Yesterday's news that KBR is playing fuck-around regarding the paying of taxes for American employees in Iraq and other hotbeds of insurgency was a wonderful eye-opener and not really a surprise by any stretch of the imagination. As TPMmuckraker puts it:
...the nation's top Iraq war contractor, lists 21,000 employees as employees of a Caribbean-based company that has neither an office nor a phone number. By creating such shell companies KBR has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxes. The Department of Defense has known about this since 2004 and rationalized KBR's scheme by asserting that it allowed KBR to work more cheaply and thus save DOD money (at the expense of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds).
Their employees found out about this the hard way of course. Like when they went to apply for unemployment after returning from Iraq and were told that since KBR didn't pay 'those taxes' they couldn't file for unemployment benefits.
Oh, and by the way, KBR has avoided paying over $500 million bucks in taxes this way. And they had a banner fourth quarter financially to top it all off..to the tune of..wait for it..
Revenue for the final three months of 2007 amounted to $2.4 billion, topping the Wall Street forecast of $2.27 billion.
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Tags: KBR,
