White House Aides Owe the IRS $831,000 in Back Taxes -- And they're Not Alone

A new report completed by the Washington Post revealed that 41 White House aides owe a combined $831,000 to the IRS. However, these aides are not alone. Federal employees nationwide owe the IRS an estimated $1 billion in unpaid taxes.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don't work down in that former swamp.

Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.

They're correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it's always seemed to those Americans who don't feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.

We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.

As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class ...

... Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along -- unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.

Read more here

Federal Workers Owe $1B in Back Taxes

According to an ABC News report, about 100,000 federal employees owe an estimated $1 million in unpaid back taxes. In an effort to recoup some of this revenue, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah introduced a new bill that would require those federal workers to pay off their tax debts or lose their jobs.

"If you get to the point where the government is putting a lien on their property and they've exhausted their appeals ... the right thing to do is fire them as a federal worker," he told ABC. "If you're going to take federal tax dollars, you should be paying your federal taxes."

Of the 2.8 million federal employees throughout the country, more than 3 percent owed unpaid taxes in 2008, according to the IRS. And that's not including retired workers or military service members. Factor them in and the numbers spike to around 276,000 current or former workers owing roughly $3 billion, according to the report.

Chaffetz says his bill mirrors efforts by the Obama administration to end federal contracts with companies that owe taxes, which the president directed federal agencies to do in January.

Continue reading at ABC News.com…

Federal Pay Ahead of Private Industry

As this article on USA Today.com explains, Federal employees earn higher wages than comparable workers in the private sector in more than eight out of 10 occupations. I have included a section of their article below, but you can checkout the full text – including a comparison chart – at USA Today.com.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector.

Federal Employees Owe $3 Billion in Taxes

Last week the IRS reported that over 276,300 current and retired federal employees owe approximately $3.04 million in unpaid taxes from 2008. Although high, this number is actually down from $3.59 million in unpaid taxes in 2007.

According to Washington Post.com, the list includes White House and Congressional staffers and current and former active-duty and reserve members of the military.

In a sign that the IRS practices what it preaches, the Treasury Department, which includes the tax-collecting agency, had the best compliance rate of Cabinet-level departments. Less than 1 percent of employees were delinquent with their taxes.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development fared worst among Cabinet departments, with slightly more than 4 percent of workers owing a combined $4.76 million.

Among all government agencies and departments, the U.S. Postal Service had the greatest number of tax delinquents. The government's second-largest employer had 28,913 workers -- or just under 4 percent -- owing roughly $298 million.

Fifty White House staffers owed a combined $812,917 in 2008, the IRS said. Up on Capitol Hill, slightly more than 4 percent of House staffers owed Uncle Sam $5.8 million, compared to 3.2 percent of Senate employees that owed almost $2.5 million.