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NSA Data Center the Focus of Tax Controversy

Posted by Unknown on from the silly-mormons-taxes-are-for-little-people dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Location is everything when choosing the site of a data center. Firms such as Microsoft and Google and Facebook spend a lot of time looking into the costs of land, power, regulation and taxes before placing their respective data centers in a particular place. Sometimes, that local tax bill comes into play in a big way. Just ask the National Security Agency which learned it faces a multimillion-dollar annual state tax on the power consumed by its new data center in Camp Williams, south of Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a series of email exchanges between the feds and the state, with the NSA protesting a $2.4 million tax on its annual power expenditure, pegged at about $40 million. Harvey Davis, director of installations and logistics for the NSA, sent a letter (subsequently quoted by the newspaper) to state officials that made the logistics argument: 'Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5bn construction at Camp Williams. HP325 [the new law] runs counter to what we expected.'" This would be the data center William Binney et al claim is logging almost all domestic communication.

2 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Robbing Peter to Pay Paul by adamchou · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, that's slightly incorrect. After reading through the articles a bit more, Utah specifically said they can't tax the federal government. So what they're doing is taxing the power company the additional 6% so that the power company can pass on the additional costs to the NSA, effectively taxing the NSA an additional 6%.

  2. Re:Cry me a river... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    (Where do you think the Federal government gets its money?)

    They borrow it from China.

    The US debt is about US$ 16.7T right now: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current

    China owns about $1.25T of that: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt

    That's about 7.5%. The next largest foreign owner is Japan, which owns $1.1T (6.6%).

    The largest single holder is the US Social Security Trust Fund, with the Fed also owning about $2T currently thanks to their quantitative easing activities.

    It's become of a bit of an urban legend: yes, China holds a good chunk, but not as much as people think.