71 Employees in Bush's Office owe $660,000 in Back Taxes

from WTOP Radio, via Common Dreams:


Federal Workers Owe Billions in Unpaid Taxes
Mark Segraves
WTOP Radio

Wednesday 17 January 2007

Washington - As the 2006 tax season approaches, the federal government is still trying to recover nearly $3 billion from its own employees who failed to file income tax returns for 2005.

More than 450,000 active and retired federal employees did not voluntarily comply with federal income tax requirements for the 2005 tax year, according to documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act.

The total balance owed is $2,799,950,165.

The documents show that every federal agency has employees who failed to comply with federal tax laws.

Seventy-one employees in the Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, owe $664,527 in taxes for 2005. About 20 of those employees have entered into an IRS payment plan, bringing the EOP balance down to $455,881owed by 50 employees.

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In fact, about one third of the delinquent employees, or 149,500, entered into a payment plan, but the total owed is still more than $2 billion.

At the IRS, employees can be fired for failure to pay federal income taxes. But an IRS spokesperson tells WTOP it's no easier to collect from federal employees than it is to collect from the general public.

In the past, IRS officials have been quick to compare the federal workers' rate of compliance with the general public's. But this year, the IRS is not able to track the compliance rate for the general public. The percentage of federal employees who still owe back taxes for the 2005 year is 3.3 percent of the workforce including retirees.

The federal agency with the highest number of delinquent taxpayers is the United States Postal Service, where 56,652 employees owe more than $320 million. So far, about 22,000 of those employees have agreed to a payment plan. .....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807M.shtml

Didn't Leona Helmsley once say that, or something similar?

:spray:

I guess I'm a girlie man latte drinker, the scourge of the the right.

And I want to know what specifically this entails.

Did have payroll taxes deducted from their paychecks or did they refuse to have the deductions made?

Or is it because they didn't file and they owed more than what was deducted from their paychecks?