NSA Data Center the Focus of Tax Controversy

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.

Comments

Re: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

[tftp]

Where have you seen an engineering project that was (a) completely finished and (b) on schedule? A "Hello, World," perhaps, in Perl?

By law, the government has to give the contract to the lowest bidder. Not the best one, and not the most honest, but to the lowest one. This means that the contractors *have* to bid low, and hope to make it up later on, during the contract. Some contracts (cost plus) allow that. A contractor who bids exact or a little over does not get the job. Fair and honest estimates are bred out of government contracting by laws.