Gulf Coast Fishermen Can't Fine For Compensation Because They Never Paid Income Taxes

After a lifetime of forking over my hard earned money to those worthless scumsucking parasites in Washington, so they could give it all to a bunch of other worthless scumsucking parasites, I'm kinda at a loss for words here....

Cash Business In Gulf Makes Compensation Difficult

by Yuki Noguchi

June 29, 2010

Cash is king in the Gulf fishing industry. And many fishermen and residents say a large, if unquantifiable, amount of the Gulf Coast's economy operates with cash. It's a segment of the economy that, for generations, has been kept in the shadows of the Internal Revenue Service.

That's a sore subject now. Since the oil spill began, many of the fishermen haven't been able to work. And they want to collect payment from the $20 billion compensation fund BP set up.

'A Cash Business'

Bobby Barnett is a veteran fisherman in Pass Christian in southern Mississippi. The waters there are mostly closed for fishing. But normally, Barnett would be catching oysters and shrimp, and selling them at the dock.

Some of that income is in documents. But "we sell a lot of cash — cash shrimp," Barnett says.

Danny Lee is a representative of Boat People SOS, a Vietnamese-American community group that, along with other similar nonprofits, offers free legal advice for fishermen in Biloxi, Miss.

"Basically it's a cash business, and they don't keep track of how much they're selling," Lee said. "But the big concern is they don't know how they can come up with the proper documentation to show they have a certain income."

Not paying taxes is, of course, illegal. But St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro says it would be unfair to penalize the fishermen now for past misdeeds.

[link to www.npr.org]