Oh What a Lovely War!

THE GREEN ZONE

You've got to give a big red, white and blue salute to Kellogg Brown & Root, the leading Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., for its efforts to keep ancillary war costs down. The company has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in the Cayman Islands, the tropical tax haven.

Reports the Boston Globe:

"When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.

"More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

“The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars."

Makes you just want to scream, doesn’t it?