Monday, April 24, 2017

Beneficial Ownership and Identity Issues: Forensic Tools

Trust accounts linked to money-laundering activities'  



Grilled about his daily lunch bills, some of which came to almost $700, Crown prosecutor Gina O'Rourke asked: "Haven't you ever considered eating in, Mr Medich, cooking a steak, having a salad?" Mr Medich replied that because he used to have chef, he had never learnt to cook, so he was forced to eat out Where Ron Medich's multimillion-dollar fortune has gone

 Behavioral Biometrics Month: The Primer


findBIOMETRICS
April is Behavioral Biometrics Month here at FindBiometrics, and over the co ming weeks we will be taking a deep dive into the discussion around the new and exciting biometric modality with in-depth articles, specialized news coverage, and the next entry in our renowned webinar series, Continuous Identity: Why Behavioral Biometrics Are Going Mainstream
Behavioral biometrics are relatively new to the identity and authentication landscape, so to kick things off we have compiled the following primer to bring you up to speed on the technology that identifies based on what you do and how you do it

Move over Touch ID—Mastercard is building fingerprint scanners directly into their cards Fast Company

Big in Australia: Snacktivism


How halal meat, french fries, cheese, and a trio of sauces came to represent much more than food


Australia's 226 federal politicians own a staggering 524 properties

The incredible shrinking Malcolm gets even smaller spouting 'Australian values' | Greg Jericho



When this articulate man starts to jibber and cling to feeble logic you know the game's over – and Peter Dutton is looming.


Jim Maule, Proving Some Tax Evidence Is Not The Same as Proving All. “Sometimes it’s not enough to produce some evidence to support a taxpayer’s claim for an exclusion, deduction, or credit. Sometimes it’s not enough to produce what the taxpayer has or knows. Sometimes it is necessary to find and produce evidence of what others have or know.”

Federal Court tax ruling against Chevron empowers tax office
'No evidence' of multinational tax evasion despite international ...


Jack Townsend, Upward Variance Not Asserted by Government Sustained on Appeal. “As I said, Judge McBryde is very smart and knows how to make a sentence likely to stand up on appeal when outside the Guidelines range.”


Frank and Steven’s Excellent Corporate-Raiding Adventure


Two law professors tried to mimic big activist hedge funds, investing their retirement savings in a small, languishing public company and trying to shake it up. Here’s what happened.



Tax Haven, Moi?

Luxembourg is continuing to insist that it’s not a tax haven. Despite the country’s own tax office signing off on thousands of deals with corporates allowing them to funnel money into the country and keep it there virtually tax free.
The latest forum where Luxembourg protests its innocence is in the state of Illinois in the US.
According to the Luxembourger Wort, the country’s ambassador to the US has written to the Illinois State government asking them to amend or reject a new law that would label the country as a tax haven.

The classification of tax havens has been of increasing interest to several US states because of the way the country levies corporation tax.

US states use a form of unitary taxation to tax their corporations, where each state looks at all of the profits made by a company in the US and then divides up the profit based on the amount of employees and/or sales the company has in their state. The state then gets to tax that profit. Recently some states like Illinois have been extending the reach of this taxation beyond the US to tax havens. This allows tax authorities to tax directly the money shifted to tax havens by companies.
Luxembourg’s ambassador has deployed a number of ingenious arguments as to why her country should be excluded from the Illinois  list of tax havens, a charge which she describes as ‘factually incorrect’. Amongst them is the argument that the country shares the same rating as the US by the OECD’s global forum on tax and transparency. Perhaps that says more about the utility of the OECD’s lists as a measure of tax havenry, rather than the  tax haven status of Luxembourg... 


Now banks are using the way you walk to stop cyber crime


"Everyone has their own unique way of walking, some of it is ... area we think will be a very important form of authentication," Mr Whaley says







  Kay Bell, How e-file and, if necessary, e-pay your taxes:

The IRS doesn’t endorse any particular tax software, but you can get a look at those who meet its filing standards by checking out the companies that are participating in Free File. Most also offer paid versions of their Free File software if you don’t qualify to use the no-cost online option.
If you are, however, eligible for Free File — that’s folks, regardless of filing status, whose adjusted gross income is $64,000 or less — consider using it. Or some other free option, either through the software companies or, as mentioned earlier, via a special deal with your bank or other financial account.
Every year parents bring in W-2s of kids who have a small first W-2, no other income, meaning they can get a little refund. I tell them that they should have the kid try to get the refund through free-file. The newly-minted taxpayer might learn something, and they then don’t have to pay me more than the refund to do the return.

A credible threat: cyber attacks and stolen credentials


One of the biggest security challenges is attackers simply walking through ... Historically, two-factor authentication (2FA) was the answer, butt (sic) ...







  • There’s a (broken) link in Bibliography of the ‘Data Checklist’ doc to the following on the Civil Forum for Asset Recovery website:



Public registers of beneficial ownership: the state of play 2017

Countries are moving more and more to public, open data registers of beneficial ownership. These registers are already in place in a number of jurisdictions. We examine these here and draw conclusions on how existing registers should be improved and new ones created.

Read more here EN | DE.
 



Is Voice Biometrics the Third Factor of Authentication the World ...


Could you use your voice to authenticate purchases or money transfers? ... in addition to the behavior of a subject, including walking speed, ...




MasterPrint: Exploring the Vulnerability of Partial Fingerprint-based Authentication Systems

“This paper investigates the security of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when multiple fingerprints of a user are enrolled. A number of consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, are beginning to incorporate fingerprint sensors for user authentication. The sensors embedded in these devices are generally small and the resulting images are, therefore, limited in size. To compensate for the limited size, these devices often acquire multiple partial impressions of a single finger during enrollment to ensure that at least one of them will successfully match with the image obtained from the user during authentication. Further, in some cases, the user is allowed to enroll multiple fingers, and the impressions pertaining to multiple partial fingers are associated with the same identity (i.e., one user). A user is said to be successfully authenticated if the partial fingerprint obtained during authentication matches any one of the stored templates. This paper investigates the possibility of generating a “MasterPrint”, a synthetic or real partial fingerprint that serendipitously matches one or more of the stored templates for a significant number of users. Our preliminary results on an optical fingerprint dataset and a capacitive fingerprint dataset indicate that it is indeed possible to locate or generate partial fingerprints that can be used to impersonate a large number of users. In this regard, we expose a potential vulnerability of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when multiple impressions are enrolled per finger.” Published in:IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Volume: PP, Issue: 99) [Pete Weiss]