BOSTON – They can bring Hollywood A-listers like Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, put Boston and other Bay State communities on the silver screen and pump millions of dollars into the local economy, but critics say the cost of film tax credits makes them a bad deal for Massachusetts.
"Every independent analysis of the economic effectiveness of film credits has found that the costs exceed the benefits," Joseph Henchman, a vice president at the Tax Foundation in Washington, said in an interview. As of last year, more than three dozen states offered film tax credits, according to Governing magazine. Nationwide, those credits total $1.8 billion annually, Henchman said.
WASHINGTON (AP) — With billions in tax dollars at stake, the Obama administration has taken a "passive" approach to identifying potential fraud involving health care, nonpartisan congressional investigators say in a report released Wednesday.
While the Government Accountability Office stopped short of alleging widespread cheating in President Barack Obama's signature program to broaden the availability of health insurance, investigators found that the administration has struggled to resolve eligibility questions affecting millions of initial applications and hundreds of thousands of consumers who were actually approved for benefits.
