Monday, October 19, 2015

Taxing Times: Adam Smith v Adam Soviet


Uzbek farmers told to glue cotton back on bushes for official visit Guardian. From Count Potemkin’s playbook.

“We continue to be transfixed by upper-crust lifestyles in a primitive, almost unconscious way, equally covetous and condemning of all that glitters, just out of reach. What is absent, it seems to me, from our sense of the wealthy, is an understanding of their flesh-and-bloodness—of the fact that they, like Shylock, bleed when they are pricked and have miseries peculiar to them, against which immunity cannot be bought.” The New Yorker Published

 Peter Reilly, Yogi Berra’s Sayings Worked Their Way Into Tax Decisions

Renu Zaretsky, A lawmaker’s work is never done.Today’s TaxVox headline roundup ranges from Russian tax revenue problems to improper EITC credits, plus much more.

David Brunori, A Word of Advice for Legislators of All Stripes (Tax Analysts Blog) “That politicians can impose economic policy through tax incentives is more akin to a Soviet five-year plan than to anything Adam Smith ever said.”

Marxism Today — feisty, fractious, produced on a shoestring — published its last issue in 1991. It's never been more relevant ...  Cold Realities 

Minsky’s sequence goes along these steps :
1) hedging
2) Speculation
3) Ponzi
4) Looting

Mr. Kobryn was determined to lower his tax burden. Instead of making sure all expenses were noted on his tax returns and perhaps contributing to a SEP IRA, he decided to not deposit all of the cash into his business bank account. He knew about the currency transaction reporting (CTR) rules, so he made his cash deposits just under $10,000 and deposited them into several branches of his local bank.
That’s a reliable way to attract IRS attention.
News from the Profession. In Order Save the Accounting Profession, It Has to Be Destroyed First (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern). “I’ll even take it a step further and say a mass extinction is exactlywhat the accounting profession needs.”

 Accused of Human Sacrifice, Tamil Nadu Mining Baron Grilled for 8 Hours. NDTV.com reports:
Mining baron, PR Palanisamy today was interrogated for nearly eight hours in connection with allegations of human sacrifice against him by the Madurai police.
Slow cooking seems harsh based on just an accusation, so I was relieved to find out in the first sentence that “grilling” was a figure of speech. That still left the mystery of why “human sacrifice” came up in a search for “tax evasion.”
A former employee of the mining baron, M Servarkodiyan, has claimed that the group targeted mentally challenged people for human sacrifice, and that he himself had brought some of the men from Pudukottai district.
Oddly, the story never mentions what the alleged sacrifices would allegedly accomplish. If it was warding off tax examiners, it did not work ...
Earlier in 2012, the mining baron was arrested in a tax evasion and illegal mining case. He’s on bail now.
The moral: Human Sacrifice fails as a tax avoidance tool. Stick with more conventional tactics, like voodoo dolls, charms and curses.

  • Fiscal Outlook: Addressing Improper Payments and the Tax Gap Would Improve the Government’s Fiscal Position,GAO-16-92T: Published: Oct 1, 2015. Publicly Released: Oct 1, 2015.

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