Word: gao
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seemed fishy. "The problem for the IRS," says a staff member on the restructuring commission, "was that they did not have the ability to go after 6 million people, so the agency arbitrarily took 800,000 to a million cases and tried to deal with them." According to the GAO, the IRS released 2 million questionable refund checks that year, even though its computers had detected irregularities...
...taking a million queries daily. Although it is still hit-and-miss to get through to a real live person on the phone, taxpayers who do speak to an IRS employee now have a 94% chance of getting the right answer, compared with 63% in 1989, according to the GAO. Last year the agency's Teletax recorded information line took 45 million toll-free calls...
...recently as 1994, Gao Feng, now 47, earned $100 a month as a machine repairman in a state-run textile factory in Shanghai. Then the nearly bankrupt firm laid off 300 workers, promising Gao 300 yuan a month to stay home. "These changes offered new opportunities," says Gao, and so he cobbled together $1,100 and enrolled in a course for taxi drivers. Gao now drives a shiny Santana cab for another state enterprise, and his take-home pay is pegged to his own moxie. On average, he says, he earns $240 a month plying his route from...
...capitalist boom, Shanghai's decrepit state industries stagnated, its infrastructure disintegrated, and its people sulked. The economic revolution wasn't reaching far beyond a few chosen cities. Recalls Li Bo, a Shanghai economist who runs a consulting firm for German companies: "The most popular expression in 1991 was 'Gao bu hao le'--everything's hopeless...
...Israelis require coach flyers to arrive at the airport three hours before takeoff, while business-class ticket holders must arrive two hours early. "Will the American public be willing to sit there for hours and hours just waiting?" wonders Louis J. Rodrigues, who led the gao inquiry. "We have to agree, as a country, that the threat is significant enough to warrant that kind of inconvenience...