KBR does it…and now another huge federal contractor is setting up ‘house’ offshore so it doesn’t have to pay their employees as… well…employees. This newest one is MPRI a sort of BlackWater-type company which is owned by L-3, one of the biggest federal carpetbaggers in the Middle East. From the IRS site on what makes one an Independent Contractor:
The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if you, the person for whom the services are performed, have the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not the means and methods of accomplishing the result.
From ThinkProgress:
MPRI’s police trainers, who asked not to be identified, said they do not work that way. One former trainer working for MPRI in Iraq said that police trainers in Baghdad received letters at the end of 2005 saying that they might experience a brief disruption in their payments because “payroll was being moved to Bermuda to satisfy US tax code.”
The letters became a running joke among the trainers. “We said, ‘What do you mean, to avoid tax codes?‘” the former trainer recalled.
The Globe notes that as a result of MPRI’s practices, “workers cannot receive unemployment compensation when their jobs end and may be deprived of other protections under US law.”
Other protections such as Workers Compensation, payment into Social Security and Buddha knows what other traditional means that cover employees. Satisfy US tax codes…don’t the bastards mean to skate the US tax codes and screw their employees?
