Monday, October 22, 2007

The law is just for the little people

Blackwater mis-categorizes employees as "private contractors" to evade taxes.

The IRS has been all over this like shit on a shingle when it comes to the high-tech industry (most "contractors" in the high tech industry today are now employees of independent contracting companies that are responsible for paying their employment taxes, not true form 1099 contractors like Blackwater is classifying their guards as), but of course Blackwater doesn't have to comply with the same laws that Motorola, Cisco, Intel, or Microsoft have to comply with because, well, because.

The law? That's just for the little people. Not for The Prince (Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater). The law only applies to people without their own air force and army, not to Blackwater. Them's the new rules, citizen, and if you don't like it, why... uhm, well, so what?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Posted by BadTux at 10/22/2007 06:01:00 PM
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5 comments:

  1. The Truffle22/10/07 6:55 PM

    Shades of Leona Helmsly, as in: "We don't pay taxes. Little people pay taxes."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous22/10/07 7:40 PM

    Yea, love it. But daddy told me independent contractors would make me richer. But you have to have the housewife dream of amway to do that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous22/10/07 10:27 PM

    One of my clients in SoCal was doing that in his printing plant, and the IRS dinged him major league.

    The way he ran his operation it made sense, because he only did large jobs that took a while to sell, so he didn't need or want a full-time staff, but they dinged him anyway.

    The problem was the people he used "forgot" to pay taxes on what he paid them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mr. 61825/10/07 3:17 AM

    It's not just the big companies. I worked for a while for a small outfit -- 7 people -- that called us "independent contractors" to avoid payroll taxes, workers comp, etc. Of course, to be an "independent contractor", the employer can only exert minimum control over work hours, location, etc, while this outfit was more controlling than WalMart.

    Although I did hear that someone ratted them out to the IRS after quitting... leaving the owner with a nice hefty tax liability.

    ReplyDelete
  5. nunya25/10/07 7:43 PM

    One of these fires started in Potrero where Blackwater wants to set up shop.

    I smell property at fire sale prices.

    ReplyDelete

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