Monday, January 23, 2012

Ninety-Eight Thousand Of My Fellow Feds Are Deadbeats


















It is an annual ritual in Washington to publish the list of tax delinquencies by federal employees. The WaPo ran it today, and it turns out that federal employees owe $1.03 billion in unpaid taxes:
Congressional staffers owed about $10.6 million in unpaid taxes in 2010, a slight increase from the previous year and a growing slice of the roughly $1 billion owed by federal and postal workers nationwide.
The figures come as Republican efforts to pass legislation allowing federal agencies to fire tax delinquent federal employees have slowed and as the White House continues to crack down on improper payments made by agencies to delinquent government contractors and federal beneficiaries.
About 98,000 federal, postal and congressional employees owed $1.03 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal 2010, according to records provided by the Internal Revenue Service. The total number of delinquent employees dipped slightly from 2009, but the amount owed jumped by $32 million.
The WaPo provided a beakdown by agency, which shows that Treasury employees have the lowest rate of delinquency at under one percent (as you might expect, since they must make a special effort to avoid tax embarrassments), and the biggest scofflaws among cabinet agencies were Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education, at 3.88 and 3.99 percent delinquent employees respectively.

Department of State employees were reasonably law-abiding, with just under three percent of them - 394 employees to be precise - owing a total of $3,958,293.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

TSB: It would be a lot higher if they had to fend for themselves on medical expenses like most people I know. Example the olympic woman skier who died January 11 in Utah.
She was kept alive til Jan 22nd to see if any brain activity.. Nope!
She had insurance but the $900,000 bill mean't bankruptcy for her parents who can now start over in their mid 50's planning for their retirement. "what a country!"gwb

Anonymous said...

TSB:in contrast, my br-inlaw is a self employed MD in Mexico. He was hit head on by a drunk driver suffering serious injuries. he has to pay for his own insurance but the annual cost is $440 and they covered everything...He's fine and no financial problem from it. gwb