– Carl Fox (Martin Sheen)
‘Scotland has become a money-laundering factory for Soviet criminal gun-runners’ The Sunday Herald
Whistleblowers linked to Australia amd Singapore: the naked capitalism issue - isolation of whistleblowers
Exclusive: Some shell companies sidestep new UK transparency rules Reuters. H/t Richard Smith, who adds: Well, not *that* exclusive
Apple has a funny way of naming its holding companies
The Apple bulls of the world like to throw around this stat: The company has upwards of $230 billion cash on hand. It’s an impressive number, but it carries an important caveat: Most of it is sitting abroad. Apple can’t bring it home without paying approximately 40% in taxes, and CEO Tim Cook has long refused to do that.
What Apple is doing is perfectly legal, as far as the U.S. tax code is concerned. Still, that the world’s largest company by market capitalization is parking overseas a sum roughly equivalent to the GDP of Finland has invited plenty of controversy. Some critics say that Apple has a duty to bring the money home and pay up, given that most of its critical research and development work happens in the U.S. (Apple is separately facing a European investigation into its tax practices.)
Panama Papers Redefining corruption: Public attitudes to the relationship between government and business
Scots firms fronting for global financial betting websites condemned as ‘scam’ The Herald
The SEC has questions about a company with no revenue, $1,000 in the bank, and a $35 billion market cap Business Insider
Ruth Mason (Virginia), Citizenship Taxation, 89 S. Cal. L. Rev. 169 (2016):
The
United States is the only country that taxes its citizens’ worldwide
income, even when those citizens live indefinitely abroad. This Article
critically evaluates the traditional equity, efficiency, and
administrability arguments for taxing nonresident citizens. It also
raises new arguments against citizenship taxation, including that it
puts the United States at a disadvantage when competing with other
countries for highly skilled migrant.
ABA Tax Section Press Release:
William H. Caudill,
a partner in the Houston, TX, office of Norton Rose Fulbright, has been
selected to chair the American Bar Association’s Section of Taxation,
the nation’s largest organization of tax lawyers. Mr. Caudill will serve
a one-year term, to be succeeded by Karen L. Hawkins, of Yachats, OR, who will serve as chair-elect.
Dublin unit of US hedge fund with $8bn assets pays $125 tax
New York Times, Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line:
Think
tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,”
have power in government policy debates because they are seen as
researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for
funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at
times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are
doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status,
sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.
Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi,
the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with
assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,”
including setting up events featuring corporate executives with
government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York
Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.
Whether driven by righteous indignation
or plain envy, the bandwagon for a crackdown on tax avoidance by the
super-rich and multinationals has gathered pace since the Panama Papers
revelations. Hartley Milner looks at some of the actions pledged and
asks whether there can ever be fairness in our tax systems.The global cost of tax avoidance
The UK Parliament's All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Responsible Tax recently published its first report [UK PARLIAMENTARY GROUP HIGHLY CRITICAL OF BEPS: SAYS IT IS JUST "STICKING PLASTER" UNTIL TAX SECRECY IS SWEPT AWAY] : A more responsible global tax system or a "sticking plaster"? An examination of the OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) process and recommendations .
The 21-page report said the OECD had "done well" to build international consensus and has made major progress in gaining cross-country agreement on sharing tax information. However, the Group believed that the BEPS rules are not enough. The Group believes that the BEPS Action Plan will fall short of creating the fair and transparent global system that is needed to tackle global tax avoidance. New global tax rules are ‘just a sticking plaster'...
LatAm Criminals Suspected of Stashing Drug Money in U.S. Shell Companies Nearshore Americas
Panama Papers: Pieth says officials are in denial as he quits
More than 100 Americans Are Rich Enough to Buy the Presidential election outright
Serious Fraud Office opens Airbus corruption investigation
HMRC outlines basic tax standard for accountants
HMRC: the standard for agents
This NYT article offers a good introduction, with quotes from noted federal judges in SDNY (Kaplan Rakoff, et al., about the vanishing criminal jury trial. The myth is that juries delivery better community justice and service on juries makes better citizens. See Benjamin Weiser, Jury Trials Vanish, and Justice Is Served Behind Closed Doors (NYT 8/7/16), here. But, the system from overcriminalization and the resulting smorgasbord of choices given to prosecutors virtually compels a plea agreement in the overwhelming number of cases that are charged. The NYT article is by no means a complete analysis of the issue, but it does introduce the issue in a straight-forward and understandable way. The Vanishing Federal Criminal Jury Trial
Australian Taxation Office cracks down on Singapore sales hub profits The Australian Business Review
The Hill: Trump’s Pushback on Tax Return Release Reveal True Ambitions, by Edward Kleinbard (USC)
United States v. McBride, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 13479 (10th Cir. 2016), unpublished, here, involves a relatively common scenario -- a U.S. taxpayer who adopts a claimed sincerely held belief that he does not owe tax in mask his tax evasion.
The prosecutor then turned to
refuting the sincerity of McBride’s beliefs, arguing they constituted a
disagreement with the law, which does not satisfy the good-faith defense. He
concluded rebuttal with the following:
Ladies and gentlemen, having
earned millions of dollars, Mr. McBride decided to pick up the bogus philosophy
to try to save what he had left. To him
paying taxes, it seems, is for schmucks, working stiffs like you and me, who go
to work everyday, earn our keep, and pay our taxes. He placed himself above
that. It's the ultimate irony, ladies and gentlemen, that Mr. McBride, who
speaks so passionately about his love for the Constitution, has taken a course
that would present a great danger to the Constitution of the United States. The
Constitution is based on a few bedrock principles that we hold dear. One of
them is that we are a nation ruled by laws, not by men. There are very few
countries that can say that.
Taxpayer Loses Cheek Defense at Trial and, on Appeal, Fails in Argument of Prosecutor MisconductIf you've ever wondered where your state's lottery money goes, read Ballotpedia's fact check for a lesson in research. And here's Reboot Illinois' fact check on an official's disturbing statement about heroin-related deaths
Agent wins case after HMRC fails to answer the phone
Donald Trump's campaign manager and the '$12m payments listed in secret Ukrainian ledger'
Trusts keep wealth in the hands of the few. It's time to stop this tax abuse
New York Times, States Vie to Shield the Wealth of the 1 Percent:
Steven
J. Oshins, a Nevada lawyer who specializes in estate planning, has
never met the wealthy software entrepreneur Dan Kloiber, but he is
nonetheless intensely interested in Mr. Kloiber’s contentious divorce. “I
have had a Google news alert on that for a couple years,” Mr. Oshins
said as he discussed the case from his office in a squat pink complex
about a 20-minute drive from the Las Vegas Strip. What animates Mr.
Oshins is not the juicy marital feud, but the legal arcana governing a
trust in Delaware where the Kloiber family parked assets worth hundreds
of million of dollars, sheltered from estate taxes
The
U.S. tax system (like most in the world) benefits capital gains in two
ways. Investors can defer paying tax until they “realize” any gain
(typically by sale) rather than when the gain simply occurs via rising
prices. And, individual investors pay a lower, preferred rate on their
long-term capital gains as compared to their other ordinary income (like
compensation or business profits).
Canadians for Tax Fairness concerned about inaction on Panama Papers National Union of General and Public Employees
Mauritius: Tax-haven twilight The Africa Report
One single aristocrat just avoided more in inheritance tax than the entire NHS deficit
Duke's £9bn inheritance prompts call for tax overhaul The Guardian
“For people who are really wealthy, inheritance tax has become an optional choice”: TJN director John Christensen
US Whistleblowers Are Poised to Collect $100 Million
'I think it is a terrible mistake': Ex-Sears executive says Walmart just wasted $3 billion on Jet.com
Who owns Britain? How the rich kept hold of land
Indonesia to Open Its Own Tax Havens to Rival Singapore
Ukip aide indicted in US on charges of blackmail and money laundering