A LivingSocial spokesman refused to comment on a report in Washington Business Journal that the D.C.-based daily deals company is preparing to cut 400 of its U.S. employees, some of whom will come from the 1,000 staffers it has in its home city.

The company also declined to comment to Washington Business Journal reporter Bill Flook, who writes that the cuts will target several aspects of LivingSocials businesses. LivingSocial has 4,500 employees worldwide; axing 400 of them would amount to an 8 percent reduction in its workforce.

There’s another pressing matter for D.C. on top of LivingSocial workers losing their jobs. As Flook points out, the $32.5 million tax break LivingSocial received from the District is incumbent upon the company growing the number of jobs it keeps here. The company’s 1,000 local employees are currently spread across six offices, and it is also set to be the anchor tenant at a new office building on New York Avenue NW.

But LivingSocial got some sort-of bad news last month when it announced that numerous writedowns on businesses it purchased led to a $566 million loss in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. LivingSocial’s founder and chief executive, Tim O’Shaughnessy, spun the losses against the company’s gains against the stumbling daily-deal juggernaut Groupon, which itself is rumored to be readying for a corporate shakeup.

Although the LivingSocial spokesman dismissed Washington Business Journal’s report as speculation, another employee inside the company said there have been “weird changes” in recent weeks. Though there has been a lot of chatter about the potential for layoffs, the employee did not say they had heard anything concrete.