Thursday, September 17, 2026

French tax authority hacked; loses data on 678,000

 White House issues Executive order to combat transnational internet fraud

Ohio: Court affirms $83 million judgment in case by Ohio AG against man responsible for billions of robocalls
 
Australia wins court case against  eHarmony dating platform over deceptive subscription practices
 
Interpol operation targets Black Axe financial networks; 58 arrested, 39 in South Africa
 
FinCEN warns of “ghost students” who sign up for college using ID theft and then collect federal loan money, never really attend; $120 billion goes through this system each year

Hackers hit more than 100 municipal water systems in the US
 
What are “brushing” scams?  The FTC just put out a new consumer ed piece on these.  These all seem to involve people receiving small packages of items they didn’t order and are not asked to pay for.  So why would anyone send these? One theory is that they use the name of the recipient to file a fake review online.  Another is that they have a QR code that, if you click, can lead to opening harmful malware programs.  I’ve also heard they may contain seeds for harmful plants. Or is it something else? I’d love to hear from any of you who know, or might have another theory.
 

Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraud and crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldHumorBenefit TheftScam CompoundsRansomware and data breachesIRS and tax fraudATM Skimming                                                       Jamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and Sextortion 
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Bluesky Reader

  • 17 September 1382 – Following Louis I's death without a male heir, his daughter Mary was crowned with the title of "King of Hungary".



 Neat little prototype demo of a Bluesky reader that uses the UI of the long-retired Paper app. I loved the design of Paper


Richard Murphy - How do you find the time for all this?



Major upgrade to the Epstein Files reverse image search

Rye – Major upgrade to the Epstein Files reverse image search at [epstein-data.com/find-i…]: I’ve doubled server capacity so I could embed every page of every document into the visual search.

  • Find-image has been expanded from ~615k images, to over 2.9 million. Side note: That’s all there is. Don’t let anyone lie to you. There are no “3.5” million (released) files. There are just over 2.9 million. That’s it. I will personally do the math out for you if you need it. Don’t say 3.5 million. It’s not.
  • There’s a new button on the document viewer page, that’ll allow you to “search by image” for any page, without having to take a screenshot.
  • Please let me know if there are any other features along these lines that would help your investigation(s).

60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality

The New York Times, gift article: “With an assist from A.I., President Trump offers a window into how he wants to be seen — and, critics say, a barometer of his mental state. 

Just before noon on a holiday weekend, while many Americans were at the beach, President Trump’s social media account roared to life. 

In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit. There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state.

 There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!” The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.

 In Mr. Trump’s digitally enhanced version of the world, he is a giant in every way, a man who defeats every adversary, overcomes every obstacle and sinks every putt. He not only redraws the map of the world but vanquishes the heavens themselves. “The Moon Is Ours,”declared one post last weekend with an image of the earth’s only satellite. 

Another posted a few weeks ago showed him leading an extraterrestrial alien in shackles. The rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts each weekend has become a fixture of the president’s second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state. 

Mr. Trump’s critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, now point to these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity as proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age…”


Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age Knowable Magazine


12

No to Crypto

Robert Reich wrote this on his Substack a couple of days ago:

There's simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime.

I know some claim otherwise, but I hardly see avoiding regulation and transparency as justification for any financial transaction mechanism.


Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance The FAS Current


Dario, Please!

POP RDI; RET: “Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently published a blog post titled We Must Pace the Frontier and it is a load of bullshit, with a grim goal of regulating open weight models and giving the frontier labs an antitrust waiver. 

Dario starts off with a claim of “AI will cure most major diseases in the next 5-10 years” and makes it personal. He talks about his father dying of a disease that was cured only years later and his own battle with cancer which he remarks was incurable 50 years ago.

 He also says AI will accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, usher in renaissance of democracy and freedom. This largely reads as some kind of out-of-touch Silicon Valley, spends-a-lot-of-time-on-LessWrong, rich person’s idea of a future. Let me take this from the top. US labs are continuing to throw caution to the wind and be reckless. OpenAI does not seem to have a handle on things and they were caught three times recently hacking into public facing internet infrastructure. 

In Dario’s own essay, he alludes to “incidents” at Anthropic as well. With this pretext, Dario asks a lot from us. He wants open weight models to be regulated, distillation be dealt with a heavy hand, hand him an antitrust waiver, handicap China in multiple ways, essentially regulate themselves and a gentlemen’s agreement to slow down. 

All of this of course, comes in a package of extreme fear mongering to the detriment of our collective future and potential catalyst AI as a whole could be. They have shown time and time again that they are not to be trusted, yet, the main ask is to trust us, only us. 

This time around, it is imminent AGI, RSI and all of it turning rogue. Dario self-anoints his company and their close rival OpenAI as the stewards…”



Oh: Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?

Jason Oh (UCLA) recently published a new piece, Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?, 22 N.Y.U. J.L. & Bus. 69 (2025). Here’s the abstract:

To what extent does the tax system distort the organizational governance of business entities? For private entities, the connection between tax treatment and governance is weak. Tax and governance can be selected independently because of flexible modern limited liability company (“LLC”) statutes and the check-the-box tax regime. 


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Wednesday, September 16, 2026

KPMG Australia Scandal Shows Misconduct Rules Need Strengthening - KPMG under investigation over audits for Prax’s State Oil arm


Oh: Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?

 

 


KPMG Australia Scandal Shows Misconduct Rules Need Strengthening

Sept. 15, 2026
Andrew Leahey
Andrew Leahey 
Drexel University School of Law

As Australia considers breaking up its Big Four firms because of renewed scrutiny, policymakers should recognize that separating audit from consulting is only part of the answer. They must also address misconduct within auditing and ensure the actors responsible bear financial consequences. Australia’s scandal may also prove a useful warning for US policymakers — and its response may offer a useful test bed.

Policymakers should focus closely on how audit firms win business. Regulators should require stronger controls on who can access confidential client information, independent review of all major sales pitches, and compensation arrangements that ensure improper gains are recoverable after the responsible partners leave the firm. Such measures would target a problem that structural separation alone can’t solve.

The allegations in Australia make the gaps clear. For example, KPMG Australia is accused of using confidential information obtained from one client to pursue audit work from others. An audit-only firm could do that — it would no longer have consulting work to cross-sell, but it still would have information that competitors don’t, while competing for audit clients.

When the same firm is tasked with both independently scrutinizing a company’s financial statements and selling that company advisory services, the incentives can compete. Entity-level separation can reduce those conflicts by making the auditor less financially reliant on the client for work unrelated to the audit in front of them.

That solution, however, doesn’t reach every source of potential misconduct inside the audit business. Indeed, US regulators have already seen a variant of this broad problem.

In 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a settlement with KPMG’s US firm over misconduct involving confidential information regarding inspections by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. According to the agency, a former KPMG partner had attempted to use improperly obtained information about the regulatory inspection of another accounting firm to help KPMG win audit business.

The US episode is instructive because spinning off a consulting firm wouldn’t have prevented it. The misconduct arose from competition within the audit sector itself. Structural separation can reduce conflicts between divisions, but it can’t eliminate the natural temptation to turn confidential information into an advantage over rivals.

Australia has already moved in this general direction for tax advisers. New legislation increases penalties against individual agents for unethical conduct and can impose liability on partners as well. That is a strong policy recognition that deterrence works best when consequences reach the people making the offending decisions, rather than falling purely at the firm level.

But penalties against individuals aren’t the same as recovery of the economic spoils of misconduct. A partner who wins business improperly may receive compensation stemming from those actions years before the conduct is uncovered. Regulators should therefore pair individual sanctions with required compensation arrangements that consider how bonuses or profit distribution can remain attributable to specific transactions — and thus recoverable when misconduct is found, even after a partner leaves the firm.

Regulators should scrutinize whether audit firms are independent from their clients, and also how they compete for new business.
Regulators should scrutinize whether audit firms are independent from their clients, and also how they compete for new business. 
Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Imagine a partner who helps win business through improper use of confidential information, receives compensation reflecting that success, then leaves the firm long before regulators can act. Years later, a firm-level penalty may be paid by current partners, including people who had nothing to do with the misconduct and never shared in the rewards. The former partner, meanwhile, may have already collected the relevant bonus or profit distribution.

Firms should remain responsible for supervision and their culture and practices, but institutional liability and individual financial accountability are different things. And each places different pressures on the relevant actors in the decision-making process. Regulators should be attentive to both.

There needs to be a more targeted response. Australia’s proposals already contemplate stronger safeguards for confidentiality. That leaves a question over whether those obligations will translate into something regulators can test.

Regulators should scrutinize whether audit firms are independent from their clients, and also how they compete for new business. Firms auditing public companies should be required to prove that access to confidential client and regulatory information is limited to legitimate professional needs, that exposure within the firm is tracked, and that sensitive information can’t migrate from an audit team to a sales pitch — even informally.

Major proposals for new audit work should at minimum receive independent review by someone whose compensation and performance metrics aren’t tied to winning the contract. That review should ask basic questions such as where the information supporting the pitch came from and what information is being leveraged. Regulators could then test controls through direct inspections of a random sampling of bids and related records.

Properly calibrated, none of this would require preventing auditors from using their experience or sector knowledge when pursuing new clients. The relevant line should be drawn between expertise gained through experience and confidential information entrusted to the firm for a specific and limited purpose. Separating audit and consulting should be seen more as a tool to prevent privileged access from becoming a competitive advantage rather than a cure-all.

Part of making sure the economic incidence of misconduct falls on the right parties would entail requiring firms to structure partner compensation so that portions tied to misconduct remain recoverable. The goal isn’t to punish every partner for every firm failure, but to key recovery to proven wrongdoing or serious supervisory failings, with an opportunity to contest responsibility.

Forward-looking compensation agreements could keep relevant payouts recoverable for a set period even after a partner leaves the firm. Said agreements should supplement penalties at the firm level rather than replace them.

Policymakers facing similar auditor confidentiality issues in other countries, including the US, should pair structural changes with rules aimed directly at the gaps misconduct has evinced. That requires placing controls over how confidential information is used when firms compete for business and modifying compensation arrangements to keep improper gains recoverable.

Breaking up the Big Four may change what firms sell. But policies also need to change how they win business — and who pays when lines are crossed.

Andrew Leahey is an assistant professor of law at Drexel Kline School of Law, where he teaches classes on tax, technology, and regulation. Follow him on Mastodon at @andrew@esq.social.


Inside the scandal that destroyed KPMG’s reputation

A whistleblower, a secret document and a self-inflicted scandal that’s cost hundreds of jobs and shattered reputations. Today, how KPMG blew itself up, with the journo who’s been breaking all the scoops, our own Tansy Harcourt.

 


Ex-KPMG chief collects $4m payout amid firm’s devastating audit scandal

Former KPMG exec Eileen Hoggett sues firm seeking documents

KPMG begins brutal 500 jobs cull amid audit scandal fallout

Labor government extends ban on KPMG work for public service

KPMG partners lied to deputy general counsel, parliamentary inquiry hears

 

This episode of The Front is presented by Claire Harvey, produced by Kristen Amiet and edited by Tiffany Dimmack. Our team includes Lia Tsamoglou, Joshua Burton and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music. 



Leaky ship KPMG retains $126m in contracts for top-secret AUKUS work

KPMG has kept its keys to Australia’s most classified nuclear secrets – worth $126m to the firm – even after admitting it repeatedly stole and shared confidential client information.



KPMG under investigation over audits for Prax’s State Oil arm 

 Big Four accountant, PKF Littlejohn and an unnamed individual to face FRC probe 

The KPMG logo displayed on the exterior of a building at Canary Wharf financial district. KPMG said it would ‘co-operate fully’ with the Financial Reporting Council ‘to conclude this matter as quickly as possible’ © Reuters

The UK’s accountancy regulator has opened an investigation into KPMG over the audits and financing arrangements of State Oil Limited, part of collapsed oil company Prax Group. 

The Financial Reporting Council said on Friday that it would use two separate procedures to probe State Oil’s accounts between 2021 and 2024, investigating KPMG for its work on the company’s books as well as an unnamed individual accountant.
The investigation will also look at the audit of State Oil performed by mid-tier accounting firm PKF Littlejohn in 2024, which took over from KPMG that year. 
Prax Group, and its Lindsey oil refinery in north-east England, plunged into insolvency in 2025, putting more than 400 jobs at risk in a blow to the UK’s struggling oil refining industry. 
The collapse provoked a fierce backlash from the UK government, which demanded an investigation into Prax’s “wealthy owner” and said that the company had been “unable” to answer questions from the government about its finances. 

Privately held Prax was founded in 1999 by chief executive and chair Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai and his wife Arani Soosaipillai with a single petrol station near St Albans. It expanded into a sprawling conglomerate spanning refineries in the UK and South Africa, petrol stations and a trading business. 

Separately from the FRC investigation, Sanjeev Kumar Soosaipillai is being sued by administrators who allege that he told employees to fake £334mn worth of invoices as part of what they called a “web of deceit” that enabled Prax to borrow from Wall Street lenders. 
The claim alleges that Soosaipillai asked senior employees to submit “fictitious invoices” for sale to support the group as it battled costly refinery works.

Soosaipillai has denied knowing about the fictitious invoices until being told about them in May or June 2025, and denies giving instructions that they should be created, according to documents filed with the court by his legal team. He told the FT in June that he had “always acted in good faith” to protect the refinery. 
KPMG said it would “co-operate fully with the FRC to conclude this matter as quickly as possible”. PKF Littlejohn said: “We take our professional responsibilities and the quality of our audits extremely seriously. We will co-operate fully with the FRC throughout its investigation.”

12

No to Crypto

 September 16 2026

Robert Reich wrote this on his Substack a couple of days ago:

There's simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime.

I know some claim otherwise, but I hardly see avoiding regulation and transparency as justification for any financial transaction mechanism.

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