NFL gives up tax-exempt status
WASHINGTON – The National Football League announced Wednesday it would cede its status as a tax-exempt entity.
Every so often, in a bid to sound threatening, a member of Congress has vowed to revoke the NFL’s tax-exempt status. Now Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league will give it up voluntarily to “eliminate this distraction.”
One result is that Goodell’s compensation – about $35 million 2013, and approximately $44 million in 2012 – will no longer need to be made public.
In a memo to all 32 teams Tuesday, he wrote that “a change in the tax status will not alter the function or operation of the league office or Management Council in any way.”
A business of about $10 billion in annual revenues, the NFL has held tax-exempt status since the 1940s, and so was required to file a publicly available IRS form listing compensation for the highest-paid employees. Individual NFL teams do not have tax-exempt status.
AT&T fires president over racist images
LOS ANGELES – AT&T Inc. on Tuesday confirmed that it has fired Aaron Slator, a president who became the subject of a $100 million discrimination lawsuit for using his work phone to send racially offensive images.
“There is no place for demeaning behavior within AT&T, and we regret the action was not taken earlier,” a company release stated.
The images in question were found on Slator’s phone by an assistant who was asked to transfer data to a new phone, according to the lawsuit filed Monday by Knoyme King, a black woman who worked for Slator.
The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, names as defendants Slator, the company, CEO Randall Stephenson, other executives and board member Joyce Roche.
Slator was president of content and advertising sales, managing its multibillion-dollar budget for content acquisition that is consumed by subscribers of Dallas-based AT&T’s U-verse TV service.
King’s lawyer, Skip Miller, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the lawsuit will continue. He said the company failed to take action earlier, despite the issue being brought to the attention of its board of directors and human-resources department.
Lawmakers file bill to end NSA program
WASHINGTON – Almost two years after the disclosure of the government’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records, Congress is confronting a fast-approaching deadline to either continue the collection or end it.
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at blocking the National Security Agency from collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. The effort was described by its sponsors as a balanced approach that would ensure the NSA maintains an ability to obtain the data it needs to detect terrorist plots without infringing on Americans’ right to privacy.
Congress failed to advance similar legislation last year, and some officials say the agency should not face new constraints at a time of deep concern over the threat from terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.
But given the politics on the Hill, in which liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans have made common cause, leaders on both sides of the Capitol appear to recognize that maintaining the NSA’s current authorities might not be tenable.
Washington Post & Associated Press
