Outfitting women soldiers not easy
More than 30 years since women became full members of the Army and the Navy opened its portholes to women for shipboard duty, the military continues to wrestle with this indisputable fact: women’s bodies differ from men’s.
Even as more than 10,000 U.S. women in uniform are front and center in the Iraq and Afghani-stan war zones, the Army and Air Force continue to labor to come up with body armor that accounts for women’s “torso curves,” according to the Army’s news service.
The Army is focusing on developing unisex designs while the Air Force is investigating “female-specific geometries,” the Army’s Jan. 7 news story said.
Also being evaluated are 13 new sizes of the standard camouflage-patterned Army Combat Uniform for women designed to encompass a variety of chest, waist and hip measurements. They are expected to debut in May.
And the Army says new helmets that can accommodate the hair buns worn by many women soldiers are planned to be available this summer.
Women make up about 14 percent of the Army’s 560,000 soldiers.
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The Internal Revenue Service, sworn enemy of tax cheats, has awarded contracts to at least 20 private-sector companies that, collectively, owed $5.2 million in back taxes, according to federal auditors.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration examined 135 firms that received IRS contracts of at least $250,000 and found 20 were federal-tax delinquents, according to the IG report released Monday, Jan. 10.
The audit, which examined a sample of contracts between October 2006 and December 2008, found that six of the 20 companies alone had a total of nearly $950,000 in unpaid taxes when they were awarded the contracts. In 2009, their tax bills had ballooned to $4.9 million.
The IRS responded that 18 of the 20 have now “resolved” their tax obligations. The agency also says it is following President Barack Obama’s 2010 executive order to examine whether prospective contractors bidding for government work owe federal taxes.
But the IG said the IRS still isn’t checking to see if companies whose contracts are renewed have run up tax bills or to check if those with continuing contracts have become scofflaws. The IRS says it has no legal authority to do either.
E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl@shns.com. For more columns, go to www.scrippsnews.com.