Sunday, April 17, 2011

Rosenbaum-Cunningham International Tax Situation

Author: James Prichard
Publication/Web URL: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/02/22/ap3454810.html
Publish date: February 22, 2007

The article focuses on failure of Rosenbaum-Cunningham International, Inc., a cleaning services company, to report its employees earnings to the IRS, hence evading tax, as well as its failure to hire legitimate, legal workers. The three managers charged also set up off-shore bank accounts to conceal revenue from the IRS.

The stakeholders involved were the three managing officials charged, the illegal immigrants the company employed, the IRS who is owed $18 million in taxes, and the companies who hired RCI for its cleaning services.

Honesty- Being truthful to the US Government and maintaining integrity as business people running a company. Rights- The right of the Mexican workers to earn fair wages for the work they were doing. Fairness/Justice- Paying the government the taxes it was supposed to pay, and hiring legal, unemployed Americans who deserve the job first, before illegal immigrants.

In what way should the managers of the company better accounted for ethical issues in making their decision to hire illegal immigrants, and paying them substandard, under-the-counter wages, as opposed to legal Americans?

The company ultimately decided to hire 203 workers and contract them out to places like Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Café, and ESPN Zone to perform cleaning tasks. The company paid these illegal Mexican immigrants substandard wages, and did not report of this to the IRS, or any other governmental or non-governmental entity. In my opinion, this was a terrible choice, not only because an operation that size was bound to get caught sooner than later, but because it is unethical to hire illegal immigrants, and pay them very little money, given the fact that they must feed a family off of that income. I would say the decision by RCI was a very weak one, and they should have taken a different approach in their attempt to run a legitimate and profitable business.

The Mexicans that were hired enjoyed the benefit of employment, wage, and living in America, whereas the same number of legal, American citizens remained unemployed throughout. Also, we’ve discussed the concept of honesty in not only the workplace, but the business world in general. You do not have to stab somebody in the back to get ahead in the world. The RCI managers chose to lead a lavish lifestyle while lying to the corporations they contracted workers out to, the IRS, and the employees themselves.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Unknown said...

I worked for that company.my ex wife and i both.i started out working with a guy named kevin smith and his brother dale smith resurfacing hardwood floors at longhorn steakhouses up and down the southeastern coast.then in ajnuary 2007 dale offered my exwife and i both jobs supervising a crew at the dave and busters in jacksonville florida for 600 dollars a week for me and 400 a week for her.we worked for 19 days at a minimum of 13-14 hours a day and never got one penny paid to us.ICE came up to the back door of the restaurant we were working at as 2 of my guys(who by the way were working there before i came along and whom i was trying to find replacements for because i was unsure they were legal but dale told me not to fire them.ICE detained me for more than 2 hours questioning me and finally i was able to finish cleaning the restaurant with just my wife and i to do the job.then when we got back to our hotel room is when we found out about the raid and that the company was shut down.it was then that we realized we were never gonna get the money owed to us.