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GAO Report: 3,700 Stimulus Fund Recipients Owe Millions in Taxes

MaggieD

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At least 3,700 recipients of federal stimulus funds owe more than $750 million in federal taxes, according to a new study from the Government Accountability Office. Of the $757 million owed, $417 million is in corporate income taxes and $207 million is in payroll taxes. The remaining $133 million included unpaid excise and unemployment taxes.

The report is the first to look at the tax records of stimulus recipients. But the act does not require contractors to be paid up, and federal agencies are prohibited from checking their records. GAO alone has the authority to match tax records with recipient reporting.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which was created to prevent Recovery Act fraud, is lobbying for the authority to do the same. In a written response to the GAO report, RAT accountability director John Higgins lamented the fact that the board "does not have access to IRS tax information -- even where such information relates to recipients of Recovery Act funds."

Senators plan to explore the possibility of denying federal contracts to subcontractors with serious tax delinquencies.

In a statement, subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said the report confirms what Congress has known for years: A "small percentage" of federal contractors shirk their tax responsibilities.

"We've strengthened the levy program to recover more funds from them, and the executive branch has made it clear nonpayment of tax can be grounds for denying a specific contract or debarring a contractor from bidding on any contract," Levin said. "Now the executive branch should get on with it and actually debar the worst of the tax cheats from the contractor workforce."

The GAO report gives 15 examples of stimulus recipients against whom the IRS has taken collection or enforcement activities. One construction company that owes more than $700,000 in federal taxes has received more than $1 million in Recovery Act awards. During the time that the company was not paying its federal tax deposit, a company executive spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at casinos. About 35 percent of the $757 million owed was from tax periods prior to 2003, according to the report.

Article has been snipped. Entirety here: GAO Report - 3,700 Stimulus Fund Recipients Owe Millions in Taxes - NYTimes.com

While one may at first easily blame "big business," the truth is that our government is to blame for this travesty.

Congress should be ashamed.
 
What no "let's get big oil" crowd to be found? Crickets.......Chirp.


j-mac
 
yesterday:

Credit Suisse Group AG (CS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) each borrowed at least $30 billion in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren’t revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public. The $80 billion initiative, called single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO, made 28-day loans from March through December 2008, a period in which confidence in global credit markets collapsed after the Sept. 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 percent that December, when the Fed’s main lending facility charged 0.5 percent.

Congress overlooked ST OMO when lawmakers required the central bank to publish its emergency lending data last year under the Dodd-Frank law. “I wasn’t aware of this program until now,” said U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee in 2008 and co- authored the legislation overhauling financial regulation.

Zurich-based Credit Suisse borrowed as much as $45 billion, according to bar graphs that appear on 27 of 29,000 pages the central bank provided to media organizations that sued the Fed Board of Governors for public disclosure. New York-based Goldman Sachs’s borrowing peaked at about $30 billion, the records show, as did the program’s loans to RBS, based in Edinburgh. Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), Barclays Plc (BARC) and UBS AG (UBSN) each borrowed at least $15 billion, according to the graphs, which reflect deals made by 12 of the 20 eligible banks during the last four months of 2008.

One effect of the program was to spur trading in mortgage- backed securities, said Lou Crandall, chief U.S. economist at Jersey City, New Jersey-based Wrightson ICAP LLC, a research company specializing in Fed operations. The 20 banks -- previously designated as primary dealers to trade government securities directly with the New York Fed -- posted mortgage securities guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in exchange for the Fed’s cash.

ST OMO aimed to thaw a frozen short-term funding market and not necessarily to aid individual banks, Crandall said. Still, primary dealers earned spreads by using the program to help customers, such as hedge funds, finance their mortgage securities, he said. “Spreads vary from one transaction to another,” making any calculation of dealers’ profits on the Fed loans impossible, Crandall said.

The Fed opposed disclosing details of its open market operations because doing so would probably cause borrowers “substantial competitive harm,” according to a March 2009 declaration by Christopher R. Burke, vice president of the New York Fed’s markets group. The declaration is filed in federal court.

Outstanding ST OMO loans from April 2008 to January 2009 stayed at $80 billion. The average loan amount during that time was $19.4 billion, more than three times the average for the 7 1/2 years prior, according to New York Fed data. After the Fed created other lending mechanisms and the Treasury Department began distributing money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in October, ST OMO became “just a way for banks to have at it,” [Michael Greenberger, University of Maryland law prof and former directer FTC] said. “At such low interest rates, it’s no longer a rescue, it’s a profit-making enterprise,” Greenberger said. “By December, a lot of money was made off this program.”

Goldman Sachs, led by Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, tapped the program most in December 2008, when data on the New York Fed website show the loans were least expensive. The lowest winning bid at an ST OMO auction declined to 0.01 percent on Dec. 30, 2008, New York Fed data show. At the time, the rate charged at the discount window was 0.5 percent. As its ST OMO loans peaked in December 2008, Goldman Sachs’s borrowing from other Fed facilities topped out at $43.5 billion, the 15th highest peak of all banks assisted by the Fed, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“The Fed was slamming the pedal to the metal in the lender-of-last-resort category,” Cochrane [University of Chicago Finance prof] said. “What they did was so far from what we conventionally think of as monetary policy.”

Credit Suisse’s borrowing peaked at about $45 billion in September 2008, the Fed charts show. Steven Vames, a Credit Suisse spokesman in New York, declined to comment. Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank’s use peaked at about $20 billion in October 2008, its chart shows. London-based Barclays’s peak reached about $20 billion in December 2008, the chart said. Mark Lane, a Barclays spokesman, declined to comment. UBS, based in Zurich, borrowed as much as about $15 billion in late 2008, the chart shows. New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS) and Paris-based BNP Paribas (BNP), France’s biggest bank by assets, took no more than about $10 billion. Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co., which is now part of Bank of America Corp. (BAC), borrowed less than $5 billion each.

The bar charts were included in the Fed’s court-ordered March 31 disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The release was mandated after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry group’s attempt to block it. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and News Corp. (NWS)’s Fox News Network LLC had sued the central bank after it refused to release lending records under the FOIA.

Fed Gave Banks Crisis Gains on $80 Billion Secretive Loans as Low as 0.01% - Bloomberg
 
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I like how no responsibility is placed upon businesses who are evading taxes.

Yeah, our government contract system is rife with fraud. But it takes two to tango, as they say. The whole system needs a cleaning.
 
I like how no responsibility is placed upon businesses who are evading taxes.

Obama Picks Jeffrey Immelt, GE CEO, To Run New Jobs-Focused Panel As GE Sends Jobs Overseas, Pays Little In Taxes

GE Pays No Taxes - The Daily Beast

remember when ge's fabled tax attorney went prostrate on one knee before CHARLIE at WAYS AND MEANS

and got his WISH granted?

and the new york public schools got THIRTY MIL from immelt's institution in return!

The whole system needs a cleaning.

that, pretty much by definition, is gonna have to START AT THE TOP

good point
 
I like how no responsibility is placed upon businesses who are evading taxes.

Yeah, our government contract system is rife with fraud. But it takes two to tango, as they say. The whole system needs a cleaning.

Evasion is illegal. And, certainly, many corporations are guilty of that. But GE not paying taxes? Blame congress. Blame the IRS. They are not evading....they are avoiding. Two very different things.
 
today:

The Federal Reserve's balance sheet expanded to a record size in the latest week, as the central bank bought more bonds in an effort to support the economy, Fed data released on Thursday showed.

The purchase was part of its $600 billion program, dubbed QE2, aimed at stimulating investment and economic activity.

The balance sheet -- a broad gauge of Fed lending to the financial system -- expanded to $2.759 trillion in the week ended May 25 from $2.742 trillion the prior week.

The central bank's holding of U.S. government securities grew to $1.519 trillion on Wednesday from last week's $1.495 trillion total.

The Fed's ownership of mortgage bonds guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) fell to $917.86 billion, from $923.58 billion the previous week.

The Fed's overnight direct loans to credit-worthy banks via its discount window averaged $11 million a day in the week ended Wednesday, compared with an average daily rate of $3 million last week.

RealClearMarkets - Reuters - Markets - May 26, 2011 - Fed balance sheet hits another record size

too much debt, too much junk, and too terrifyingly undiversified

no?
 
Evasion is illegal. And, certainly, many corporations are guilty of that. But GE not paying taxes? Blame congress. Blame the IRS. They are not evading....they are avoiding. Two very different things.

Well, gee, you posted an article about evasion so I went and assumed you were discussing evasion when you said this was the government's fault.
 
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