Bailouts for Tax Cheats??!

There’s an old joke about how snakes don’t bite lawyers out of professional courtesy.  But tax cheats?

Thousands of companies that cashed in on President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package owed the government millions in unpaid taxes, congressional investigators have found.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report being released Tuesday, said at least 3,700 government contractors and nonprofit organizations that received more than $24 billion from the stimulus effort owed $757 million in back taxes as of Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the budget year.

The report said the tax delinquents accounted for nearly 6 percent of the 63,000 contractors and grantees examined, and it cautioned that the real number might be higher because the known tax debt does not measure such factors as income underreporting.

Among the examples was an engineering firm that received a $100,000 stimulus act contract but owed $6 million in taxes. The IRS called it “an extreme case of noncompliance.” A social services nonprofit that received more than $1 million in stimulus funds owed taxes of $2 million.

The GAO referred those two cases and 13 others to the Internal Revenue Service, the country’s tax collectors, for further investigation.

Now, honestly, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given the level of representation that tax-scofflaws have in both the executive branch, in the form of Tim Geithner, and in the House, in the form of Charlie Rangel, among others.

Maybe they’re just another minority special interest group?

Dave in EH

7 Comments

  1. sammy22 on May 28, 2011 at 1:23 pm

    Some unpaid taxes go back to before 2003: DISGUSTING! A mere $417B are unpaid corporate taxes: DISGUSTING and $207B are unpaid payroll taxes: DISGUSTING. If you have the pull, you pull-off almost anything.



  2. Don Lombardo on May 28, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    Al Capone was put away for tax evasion. Hello Mr. Holder. Oh, I forgot – these people?are to big and important to be sent up the river for a trival thing like not paying taxes.



  3. ricbee on May 28, 2011 at 8:23 pm

    Almost all corruption stems from the top,a corrupt Fed will do nothing but breed more of the same.



  4. Dimsdale on May 29, 2011 at 1:06 am

    Why not bailouts?? They gave jobs to tax cheats!
    ?
    Flat tax: remove the loopholes and the legal cheating gets eliminated.



  5. Lynn on May 29, 2011 at 8:18 am

    Dave in EH, where have you been? I love your posts and hope you keep them coming. As a special credit to you, this is a subject that both Sammy and Dimsdale were on the same side.? If we can have an agreement on this subject, do you think we can get Congress to stop the idiotic stimulus packages? I’m for flat tax, but would love to see a National Sales tax (replacing income tax) to make?? pimps, drug dealers? and the mafia pay some tax on their toys.



  6. Lynn on May 29, 2011 at 8:22 am

    Should also make Congress pay tax on all the benefits they receive from us. Oh and foundations and non-profits.



  7. GdavidH on May 29, 2011 at 3:52 pm

    Leona Helmsley:
    “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

    http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/leonahelms126543.html



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