Tax Form Could Doom Iraq's Interpreters

For years, Iraqi interpreters dodged death threats and roadside bombs and U.S. bureaucratic indifference, as they kept American troops and local Iraqis talking. Many of the translators wore masks during work, to keep their identities secret from the militants. Others kept their families in the dark about their jobs. Still others just relocated to American bases.

But now, as Iraq finally seems to be gelling into a more stable country, these interpreters are facing a new threat, Spencer Ackerman writes: a simple tax document. Form D/4a from the Iraqi Ministry of Finance requires employers to submit the real names, addresses, and phone numbers of each of their workers. The intepreters worry that, in the wrong hands, it could become a hit list.

Several weeks ago, Global Linguist Solutions (GLS), the company that holds the contract with the U.S. military to provide translators, entered into negotiations with the Iraqi government about what their new obligations are for withholding employee taxes…. The company said emphatically that it has no intention of turning over identifying information for its roughly 7,000 Iraqi employees…

But many of these contractors don’t trust GLS to keep its word. Some are considering fleeing Iraq entirely, raising the prospect of U.S. service members losing their ability to talk and listen to Iraqis. “We either quit,” said Garrison, the pseudonym of an Iraqi interpreter, in an email, “or sign our own death warrants by turning the information [over] to the ministry.”
Wired