State unemployment payroll taxes will likely increase by an average of 10% in 2005, according to UWC, a business association that follows the topic. The rate of increase is lower than in the past two years.

Businesses in these states can look for significant payroll tax increases: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Contrack International Inc. has walked away from a $325 million contract to rebuild roads and bridges in Iraq, saying the cost of security was hampering its work and crimping profit margins.

The Arlington, VA, company is the first major contractor to quit the Iraq reconstruction effort. “We reached a point where our costs were getting to be prohibitive,” the company’s president, Karim Camel-Toueg, told the Los Angeles Times.

Company executives told the newspaper that one of the joint venture’s drivers had been kidnapped and killed, other employees and subcontractors had been threatened, its headquarters had been attacked and its construction sites had been shot up. Camel-Toueg said security costs consumed 60% of the budget for some projects.

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Iraq Project and Contracting Office said that office would take over management of Contrack’s subcontractors and continue the work, the Times reported.

The Government Accountability Office has issued a proposed rule to allow federal employees to protest the decisions in public-private job competitions. The rule would implement a provision of the 2005 Defense Authorization Act.

For job competitions involving more than 65 employees, the law gives federal employees protest rights for the first time. The protest must be filed by the “agency tender official,” the government manager who supervised the in-house proposal.

“Consistent with the legislation,” GAO said, it will not review that official’s decision on whether to file a protest. Federal employee unions have said the agency tender official is not likely to protest, since he is part of management.

The proposed rule is FR Doc 04-27615 in the Dec. 20 Federal Register. Comments are due Feb. 18.

GSA and OMB will hold a public meeting Jan. 19 in Washington to hear comments on the proposed Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors.

The meeting will explore privacy and security issues under the draft standard that was released Nov. 8. (See http://csrc.nist.gov/piv-project.) The standard is required under a presidential order.

It calls for a single smart card to be used by all federal employees and contractors who regularly work in federal installations. But some unions are worried that the card may be too smart. The National Treasury Employees Union says it could be used to track people’s movements within a building, enabling managers to learn when employees visited the inspector general or the Employee Assistance Program.

The meeting will be held Jan. 19 at 8:30 a.m. at the auditorium of Potomac Center Plaza, 550 12th Street SW. To attend, you must register by Jan. 11 by e-mail to sara@nist.gov.

SBA has approved more than $1 billion in low-interest disaster loans to about 33,600 residents and business owners who suffered losses in last summer’s four major hurricanes.

Disaster designations covered parts of 14 states and Puerto Rico.

SBA says the final total of loans will surpass the amount approved after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but will fall far short of the largest disaster ever handled by the agency, the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake, when more than $4 billion in SBA loans were approved