CAYMAN ISLANDS – Kellogg Brown and 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.
With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor. The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000. Cheney’s office at the White House referred questions to his personal lawyer, who did not return phone calls.
It is said that war is good for the economy, now you cant even count on that.
I’ve never believed that war is good (long term) for an economy. That said, I hate income tax so I’m all for avoiding it in any legal way possible.
The Business of America is WAR, and the Military/Industrial Complex will BANKRUPT AMERICA and leave a hulk !!! Keep voting Republican for MORE OF THE SAME !!!
Woohoo!!! A way to keep from paying taxes, and that’s bad how?
Democrats call it a loophole for the big bad American companies.
Republicans call it good business.
If I could find a legal way to avoid taxes (and still live here) I would do it as well.
#2 Or, vote Dem (proud sponsors of the 2 out of 3 of the largest wars since WWII). BTW – We still have troops deployed oversees from one of them…
I can’t see the problem. Corporations are established to maximize profits for shareholders and that’s exactly what KBR is doing. Everyone who owns KBR stock, including via their pension funds etc. ought to be overjoyed at this tactic. Shouldn’t they?
#3 – If I could find a legal way to avoid taxes (and still live here) I would do it as well.
I have no objection to that as long as you don’t use roads, police or fire services, public parks or recreation facilities, or any kind of publicly available government service at all.
It is amazing how often I hear the tiresome mantra of law and order, fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, the virtue of a free market economy, and bla bla bla.
It isn’t that those are bad things, per se, but rather that those who bluster about it are at best hypocrites and at worst bold faced liars. You want something for nothing. You want free lunch. You might think you are self reliant, but you are delusional. You cannot maintain your comfy lifestyle without local, state, and federal government services and you need to pony up the dough for that just like everybody else… or just move off the grid and live a lonely existence as a misanthropic cranky hermit.
Taxes are just the price we pay to live as we do. Not wanting to pull your weight is simply un-American.
War is good. Yes it is–
For those that sell the services required to maintain a war.
Have any of you watched Lord of War ? Good movie that kinda makes the same point I stated.
“Look, daddy, the terrorists have won, again!”
“No, son, they didn’t win. The war is about money, and it always was.”
#6 – “I have no objection to that as long as you don’t use roads, police or fire services, public parks or recreation facilities, or any kind of publicly available government service at all.”
Okay. Roads = fed & state gas tax. Fire, etc. my property tax & sales tax.
I’ll pass on income tax and use only what I pay for. No prob.
Maybe they should lwoer taxes, and make things easier for small businesses.
I worked for these guys in 2003 here in the UK.
Has nobody else noticed how geographicaly close the sites of this company are to police stations?
Scarily close with many being opposite the street from each other.
#9 (patrick): tax is tax. If you want to maintain the level of servies you use, and income tax is eliminated, your gas, property, sales, etc, taxes have to go up proportionetly. Or perhaps what you’re getting at is you perfer (or lean towards) a total capatalist system where every service is paid for directly…kind of an opt-in privitized “insurance” based country with little or zero government. So for example if your house caught fire, if you didnt have fire truck insurance it would burn to the ground. I haven’t thought throgh that fully but I think the positive potential in people are that we’re social, cooperatieve, and caring, and so a tax system that’s a balance between the two extreems is optimal. We’ll always be arguing about where that optimal point is. And to some extent to be part of a cooperative society the rich and well-to-do need to help out the poor and disadvantaged. And an income tax fits nicely into that paradigm.
Corporations are “amoral” to begin with. What makes them “evil” is they bribe our government for special tax legislation to get special treatment.
This isn’t tax policy or democracy at work, it is thuggery.
Maybe flat tax without exception would be more fair?==interesting concept that will never happen because then the thugs lose their advantage.
#14, patrick,
So now you are anti American.
In the United States we have a Constitution. It provides the basis for all the laws and social order in our country.
Preamble
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
See? Nothing about economics or free markets or the right of companies. It is about the PEOPLE. Did you read that part in the middle, “promote the general welfare”? It is referring to American citizens.
I know, you anti Americans think it is just a god damned piece of paper. Actually, it is parchment.
They would have to cut back all the crap that is useless to me.
How very talibanish of you