Word: gao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...degrees, the snow feels more like Sno-Cone crystals than real powder and there are no lifts?just an escalator that takes skiers partway up the slope. Still, a Yinqixing spokesman says the facility has recorded 500,000 visits since opening in 2002. One such customer is Shanghai native Gao Rujin, who recently brought her 6-year-old son to enjoy the indoor winter wonderland. "When I was a child, I never had opportunities like this," she says as she straps on the boy's rented skis. "I want to cultivate a spirit of adventure in my son by exposing...
...cheats deprive the federal government of hundreds of billion of dollars in much-needed revenue each year. But many of those cheats actually work for the federal government as contractors, according to prepared testimony being given to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing arm of Congress. In fact, more than 3,800 contractors that do business with the General Services Administration have tax debts totaling about $1.4 billion The GSA is the giant organization that spends about $20 billion annually to provide other agencies in the federal government with practically everything they...
...GAO review of Internal Revenue Service records and GSA contracts for 2004 and 2005 found that about 10% of the vendors under contract with the agency, or over 3,800, had cheated on their taxes. In most cases, the scofflaws didn't pay their corporate income tax or company owners lined their pockets with the IRS payroll taxes they'd collected from their employees for Social Security, Medicare and individual income taxes. One contractor who provided $1 million worth of security services to the federal government from 2003 to 2005 also had unpaid taxes of over $9 million; the owner...
...Fixing the problem isn't apparently that easy, either. The GAO report noted that federal law "does not require GSA contracting officers to examine tax debt when awarding contracts." And even if a contracting officer wanted to check the tax status of a vendor he'd have a difficult time doing so because federal law also restricts his access to IRS tax records, according to the GAO...
...wonder that the GAO uncovered similar problems only two years ago. The same congressional watchdogs found over 27,000 defense contractors doing business with the Pentagon that owed $3 billion in back taxes. Since that report in 2004, the Pentagon and other federal agencies have increased the amount of back taxes recovered from contractors by over 600%, according to Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, chairman of the Investigations Subcommittee. A GSA spokesman says his agency "takes the issue of unpaid contractor taxes very seriously and all federal contractors should be held to high standards." He said GSA is working...