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The Men Who Built America - Series Premiere Tue., Oct. 16 at 9/8chttp://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america/articles/about-men-who-built-america John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan rose from obscurity and in the process built modern America. Their names hang on street signs, are etched into buildings and are a part of the fabric of history. These men created the American Dream and were the engine of capitalism as they transformed everything they touched in building the oil, rail, steel, shipping, automobile and finance industries. Their paths crossed repeatedly as they elected presidents, set economic policies and influenced major events of the...

House to vote on bill terminating federal workers who don't pay their taxesBy Pete Kasperowicz and Bernie Becker - 07/30/12 09:27 AM ET The House will vote on legislation as early as Tuesday that would require the federal government to terminate workers with "seriously delinquent" tax debts. The bill, which also would prohibit the government from hiring people who are late on their tax payments, tries to deal with the roughly 100,000 federal workers who are usually behind on their taxes each year. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the bill’s sponsor, has cited IRS data indicating that these workers owed a...

Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Wednesday. Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But the Federal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm. That meant FHA insured $1.4...

Investigating the IRS: Why it gives billions to illegal immigrants INDIANAPOLIS - Why are many illegal immigrants getting a bigger tax refund than you? Blame it on the IRS and a massive tax loophole that's now being exposed by Eyewitness News. 13 Investigates has found the IRS is giving away your tax dollars to illegal workers and people who don't even live in the United States - and the problem is costing billions! We want you to see exactly where your money is going and why the IRS is allowing it to happen. From the homes of illegal workers in...

Illegal aliens working in the United States are technically required to fill out a tax return and pay their income taxes. We all laugh about claiming a additional deduction here or there for some neighborhood kid who eats the food out of your fridge and hangs out at your house all the time, but many of these workers are claiming deductions for children living in Mexico. Each spring, at tax preparation offices all across the nation, many illegal immigrants are now eagerly filing tax returns to take advantage of a tax loophole, using their ITIN numbers to get huge refunds...

Meet the recallers. They've developed a powerful antibody to shame. Over the next 29 days, state and local governments will pay $17 MILLION because the left didn’t get their way. It's a funny coincidence that some of the people that signed the recall petitions just happen to owe over $17 MILLION in back taxes and that's only part of the recall list! Have you ever had your lawn get away from you for a while? Maybe your kids have a dance recital or you have family coming into town and you just didn’t have the time to mow it? Eventually,...

MEN OF HONOR Apparently, if you want to cheat on your wife or spurn the mother of your unborn child, cover up and easily settle your institution's criminal efforts to help Americans avoid paying their federal income taxes, or just avoid paying your own fair share, the place to be is on President Barack Obama's economic-recovery advisory board. Because that's where Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS Group Americas, the U.S. arm of one of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS AG, sits, as do Charles E. Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management of...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Pamela Anderson and Lionel Richie owe the government money. California tax authorities said Anderson owes $524,241 in personal income taxes. The Franchise Tax Board included the "Baywatch" star on a list of the state's 500 biggest income-tax delinquents posted Friday.

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...

Negotiations are underway to transfer ownership of the main Kennedy home in coming months to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, a proposal that has raised concerns among family members who live on adjacent property, according to two associates close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity. The senator, who died in August 2009, had stated in his will that he ultimately wanted the property to be turned over to the institute, which is now being built next to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Columbia Point. He gave the rights to the...

The criminals at ACORN, President Obama 's former employer, never stop ripping off American taxpayers. The massive conglomerate ACORN Housing Corp. and its subsidiaries owe an eye-popping $162,813 in back taxes, according to the Nexis public records database. The money is owed to the IRS, California, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, the city of Philadelphia, and the California counties of Fresno and Santa Clara. (A list of the 106 tax liens may be viewed here.) Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name to Affordable...

Radar Online is reporting that a bunch of Hollywood’s elite are being sued in connection with their participation in high-stakes poker games. The civil complaint alleges that the money won by said Hollywood elite was actually money stolen by a hedge-fund manager from his clients to pay off his enormous gambling debts. According to the report, Toby “Spider-Man” Maguire was the big winner making $1,000,000 a month in winnings. Interesting. Maybe the next time Maguire is in D.C. for a photo-op with President Obama, he can explain to the president why he’s exempt from paying his fair share of taxes...

When President Obama signed the trillion-dollar stimulus law in 2009, he proclaimed that he was "keeping the American dream alive in our time." The stimulator-in-chief failed to mention that billions would be spent keeping American tax scammers afloat on our dime. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, federal auditors reported on the latest porkulus spending gone wild. According to a new General Accounting Office audit conducted over the past year, nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds -- while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. Among the tax-cheating federal contractors...

NEW YORK—New headwinds—most notably oil prices—confront the U.S. march to recovery, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday. Unemployment, long a weak spot in the economy, remains "very high," and the economy feels "unfairly hard" to most Americans, Mr. Geithner said in comments that weighed on the dollar. He said oil prices at current levels, while challenging, weren't at levels that threaten to derail the recovery. First, though, U.S. lawmakers must agree to increase the debt limit, something some politicians have said they will not do unless there is broad agreement on massive cuts to a bloated federal budget. The...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Senate will soon issue findings of a probe of the US mortgage meltdown that fueled the global financial crisis, with Goldman Sachs likely to face fresh embarrassment over its role, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose high-profile inquiry commission subpoenaed Goldman's and other executives last year, is due to release its report on the subprime implosion of 2007 and 2008. The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said the report was expected to release emails from securities firms that developed or sold subprime mortgages and financial vehicles including...

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...

A judge today upheld the federal government's right to ban the mailing of cigarettes by Seneca Nation tobacco businesses, but rejected for the time being the collection of taxes on those cigarettes. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Arcara upholds the crux of a new federal law that Seneca business owners say will cripple their mail-order operations. In short, the judge banned the sale of tobacco products through the mail but allowed for other forms of interstate sales of tax-free cigarettes. Under the law, buyers would still be required to pay the taxes on those cigarettes. The Prevent...

I am beginning to think that our tax collecting agencies across the country send out a form letter to everyone that is in arrears with their taxes to immediately apply for a job in Barack "Most Ethical Administration in Decades" Obama's administration. Here we have another Obama lieutenant that didn't pay his taxes until someone began to inquire after them. This time it's Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, who decided that he was far, far important to be expected to pay his property taxes here in Chicago. Emanuel suddenly remembered to pay his taxes -- three months late --...

One aspect of a new and improved federal regulatory scheme is the seizure of 401(k) retirement plans and the subsequent government-administered disbursement of the funds. In Chapter 3 of the Annual Report on the Middle Class released in February by Vice President Biden and the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, the Obama administration calls for enhancing the “retirement options” for the middle class by imposing “new regulations to improve the transparency and adequacy of 401(k) retirement savings.” The plan, as sketched in the 43-page document, calls for the creation of something called “Guaranteed Retirement Accounts” (GRAs). Biden...

*snip* The Tax Division has assisted the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in tracking down tax cheats who use offshore accounts, combating abusive tax shelters, stopping tax defiers and shutting down tax schemes and scams. *snip* Further success against offshore scheme promoters was achieved in May 2009 and February 2010, in United States v. Liddell and United States v. Bright, respectively, where the Ninth Circuit granted the IRS access to business records identifying customers who used offshore credit cards to shield income.