Remember back when the oil spill first started to get really ugly, and BP announced their efforts to start the cleanup, by whatever means were necessary?
BP even went so far as to hire some 2,000 people to assist with the effort – 2,000 people who lived in the gulf coast area. BP also very publicly announced that they’d only consider people who had been out of work for 60 days or more – under the auspices that they were altruistically working to improve the lot of these folks who had been impacted by the economy, and further by the spill itself.
I’m not going to address the spill or the cleanup, this has been discussed in many forums to great length. Regardless of the effort put in and the emotional ramifications of BP’s cleanup effort – I found it interesting that BP specifically indicated they’d only consider folks who had been out of work for 60 days.
The reason this is interesting is that this is the very qualification required to take advantage of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act of 2010 (HIRE Act 2010). With this law, all of the wages that these qualified new employees earned are subject to forgiveness of OASDI tax, a benefit equal to 6.2% of the wages paid between March 18, 2010 and December 31, 2010.
I don’t fault BP for taking advantage of the tax law – I just thought it was important to point out that the company wasn’t simply being altruistic with their choice of workers. Even in this hour when we Americans, the consumers of their product and those impacted by their greed, needed this company to be heroic with their intentions and their efforts, they still found a way to work things in their favor in the working out of the cleanup. Nice.
Photo by jb
Sterling Raskie, MSFS, CFP®, ChFC®
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