Bailout Companies Owe Federal Taxes

Filed in National by on March 19, 2009

This is choice:

Some top recipients of U.S. bailout money owe the federal government more than $220 million in unpaid taxes, a U.S. lawmaker said on Thursday.

Representative John Lewis, a Democrat who heads the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, said 13 bailed-out companies owe the federal government taxes. Two of them owe more than $100 million each.

Lewis said that the firms, which he did not name, signed statements at the time of receiving federal aid stating that they owed no federal taxes. Lewis said the revelation raises further questions about the bailout program.

So I guess forcing these firms into doing the right thing is the only thing left. Other options?

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Comments (3)

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  1. Dana says:
    March 19, 2009 at 11:37 am

    It’s real simple: we’ll give them billions of taxpayer — and Chinese — dollars in bailouts, some of which they’ll use to pay their taxes.

  2. Phantom says:
    March 19, 2009 at 2:58 pm

    Does anybody see a pattern developing with paying taxes? All the wealthy individuals and powerful companies don’t seem to pay thier taxes but for those of us not in that category the IRS will nail our asses for not paying. Maybe we need to adjust penalties on a sliding scale related to total income (not adjusted gross). That way the pain will put the rich and powerful down in the pits with us if they try to screw us by not paying taxes and the government will recoup even more than originally intended.

  3. cassandra_m says:
    March 19, 2009 at 7:00 pm

    This has long been an issue — whether the IRS spends its time surveilling regular, working taxpayers or go for the big money in wealthy individuals and corporations.

    I heard someone who used to work for the IRS talk about this — and his take was that the IRS is underfunded and understaffed, which limits how much labor they can assign to reviewing large, complex tax returns. This guy said that if it took a couple of floors of people from PriceWaterhouse to do the taxes of a Fortune 10 firm, then one or two people from the IRS are never going to be adequate to a serious tax audit. So they do what they are staffed to do — go after the relatively smaller fish, but go after more of them.

    The IRS just took back its own collections and I hear that they are hiring more auditors now.

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