WILD SPECULATION AHEAD!!! So some of us are obviously more trustworthy than others:
Tax Krimes
James Shipton, the chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), has called on the finance industry to lift its professionalism and improve the public's trust in the industry. Mr Shipton told the annual ASIC forum in Sydney on Monday that trust had to be earned, it could not "magically appear"
An interview with Chris Jordan - Commissioner circa 2014
Why Chris Jordan wants small business owners' dealings with the ATO to be like going to the dentist
Doughnut Time Founder Damian Griffiths Reportedly Owes The ATO A Million Bucks
New technology has the potential to completely change the face of tax law and accounting: that was the take-away from a recent installment of a tax and tech series organized by Professor Jeffrey Owens and Julia de Jong of Vienna University’s Digital Economy Taxation Network. The roundtable on Governance Implications of Disruptive Technology assembled experts from Microsoft, PWC, think tanks, and the academy.
The session began with a staggering prediction that large companies will sack up to 40% of their tax compliance employees in coming years. Why? Experts anticipate that technological progress in data collection and algorithmic reporting will allow audit functions to be built directly into data collection and management. This integration will allow governments to coordinate seamlessly with taxpayers by assuming the role of tax preparers whose reliance on algorithms largely eliminates the need for auditors. Similarly, data technology will eventually obsolete VAT returns, an administrative headache for most of the globe and a major source of work for the accounting industry. Eelco van der Enden, a partner with PWC Netherlands, went so far as to predict the breakup of Big Four accounting within ten years as technology grabs the tax prep reins and renders auditing obsolete.
Disruptive technologies that leverage data also have the potential to revolutionize how we address the tax gap. As van der Enden noted, “[d]ays are gone when you could create a bunch of bullshit” in a tax return to force regulators into a negotiation. The ready availability of data from sources as disparate as taxpayer reporting, social media accounts, and even satellite pictures of the planet are poised to revolutionize business and tax transparency. In addition, advances like quantum computing, when combined with what has been called a tsunami of data, will allow tax systems to handle an exponentially increasing amount of complexity. Transfer pricing, for instance, will be a whole new ballgame with the advent of close-to-omniscient tech. When (not if, but when) complexity no longer results in a loss of efficiency on the human side, tax administrations could see large gains from re-regulation in some cases.
As Harald Leitenmuller of Microsoft concluded about tax experts going forward, “[t]he future of your profession is to be a good data scientist who can leverage the knowledge hidden in the existing data.” Congress and IRS, take note.
(Written with thanks to Fulbright Austria for supporting my work.)
Community confidence and Trust .... From information to knowledge to judgment and wisdom of experience. Harry Surden (Colorado), What to Teach Law Students About Artificial Intelligence and Law?, 112 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online ___ (2018):
It is helpful to provide law students with a basic understanding of the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) and its likely near-term impact on law. With this knowledge, students can orient their careers to avoid those legal positions that are most vulnerable to automation and focus instead on activities for which their legal training and cognitive abilities provide the most value for clients.
Despite the adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the Tax Court issued an opinion last week suggesting that sometimes ignorance of the tax law can indeed be an excuse, at least to escape the §6662 accuracy-related penalties. In Karl F. Simonsen and Christina M. Simonsen v. Commissioner, 150 T.C. No. 8 (Mar. 14, 2018), the Tax Court held that a California couple who messed up the tax treatment of a short sale of their former residence were not liable for accuracy-related penalties. Judge Mark “I’m No Caligula” Holmes wrote for the Court. The actual basis for the holding was that the IRS “failed to meet [its] burden of production on the accuracy-related penalty” because it did not introduce any evidence of compliance per the Tax Court’s newly discovered reading of§6751(b)(1). Our colleagues over atProcedurally Taxing have been following the §6751 issue for some time. If you are interested,here’s a good post by Professor T. Keith Fogg to start you out.
But immediately after throwing out the penalty for the IRS’s failure to produce the required evidence, Judge Holmes wrote four pages of dicta about how even if the IRS had met its burden, the taxpayers here acted with “reasonable cause and in good faith” within the meaning of the exculpatory language of §6664(c)(1). Why did he spend so much time doing this? Because he wanted the world to know that “we will not penalize taxpayers for mistakes of law in a complicated subject area that lacks clear guidance.” And one of the factors that went into the “good faith” conclusion was that Mrs. Simonsen not only consistently used TurboTax for over 11 years to prepare the couple’s returns, but had to upgrade to “a CD-ROM version of TurboTax instead of the usual online version because she needed a special form...to properly report the...income.” That caused my colleague Gregg Polsky to email me with this query: “So this case means that taxpayers that follow Turbo Tax to a completely illogical result are immune from penalties?”
Well, maybe...but then again remember this is just dicta. And while the Tax Court is correct that tax is a “complicated subject area” I do not think it was correct in finding that the taxpayers here had no “clear guidance.” But reasonable minds may disagree.
Along with the penalty lesson, this case teaches a nice lesson on the tax treatment of a short sale of property encumbered with a non-recourse loan. I’ll run through that first because it may help us understand why the Tax Court here was willing to let ignorance of the law be a defense to accuracy-related penalties.
18-year-old Steve Jobs' job application sells for more than $170000
What the SA election means for the public sector
It really will be a new dawn if newly sworn-in Premier Marshall fulfils his promise to place a premium on frank and fearless advice and end political patronage.
Ex-PwC boss Tony Harrington leaves MinterEllison
The 60 year-old's LinkedIn profile shows he has already joined the board of not-for-profit ABCN, which builds relationships between business and disadvantaged students. Insiders expect he will pursue another market-shifting role.
The 60 year-old's LinkedIn profile shows he has already joined the board of not-for-profit ABCN, which builds relationships between business and disadvantaged students. Insiders expect he will pursue another market-shifting role.
Announced at Mobile World Congress 2018 - Soul Machines has entered into a new partnership with Daimler Financial Services to create Sarah, a digital ...
EXTORTION AT ESPN:
The Hollywood Reporter has finally uncovered the reason behind John Skipper’s
sudden departure as the president of ESPN back in December. With persistent
questioning, ESPN historian and journalist James Edward Miller was able to get
Skipper to open up to that fateful day when he realized a
long-kept secret was in danger of being exposed because of his
carelessness.
Govt gets over 30 data breach notifications in three weeks under new disclosure laws
Comes as shipping firm, Svitzer, notifies the OAIC of a data breach that reportedly affected almost half of its Australian employees
It
arms you with a fresh perspective from students who landed great legal
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form the foundation of a straightforward six-step process to create
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Inside Higher Ed, Is Gossip Grounds for Termination?:
Discussions
about tenure votes are considered private on most campuses, but some
say Dixie State is trumping up breach of confidentiality claims against
two professors to get rid of them for political reasons.
While
institutions are beginning to take more action on faculty misconduct,
tenured faculty terminations remain rare and typically follow reports of
serious misconduct. So the mysterious firings of two longtime, tenured
professors of music at Dixie State University in Utah last week are
attracting attention — including a petition to bring them back.
New York Times op-ed: Why Are Your State Tax Dollars Subsidizing Corporations?, by Nathan M. Jensen (Texas):
Last
year, the state of Georgia entered the competition for Amazon’s second
headquarters. The state put billions on the table to woo the company and
its potential 50,000-job, $5 billion investment.
This
year, not long after Atlanta was named one of the 20 finalists for
Amazon HQ2, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle of Georgia lashed out at Delta Air
Lines after it suspended discounts for members of the National Rifle
Association. Mr. Cagle declared he would kill state tax breaks for the
airline, and the Republican State Legislature followed through by
removing about $40 million in tax incentives from Delta.
The
Amazon offer was an effort to attract business, while the Delta
punishment will probably have the opposite effect. But they are both
really about the same thing: political theater.
Some Federal Judges Handle An Inordinate Criminal Caseload
“During the past five years, through December 2017,
forty-nine federal district court judges each sentenced more than one thousand defendants who appeared before
them. All but two of these judges were
located in courthouses along the southwest border with Mexico. In contrast,
typically judges sentenced several hundred, not several thousand defendants
over this five year time span. U.S. District Judge Robert C. Brack, in Las
Cruces, in the District of New Mexico, topped the list sentencing 6,858
defendants. Eighty-five percent of those sentenced were convicted for
immigration offenses. U.S. District Judge Alia M. Moses was in second place,
sentencing 5,135 defendants who appeared in her Del Rio courtroom in the
Western District of Texas. In third place was U.S. District Judge Kenneth John
Gonzales who sentenced 4,668 defendants. Judge Gonzales also sits with Judge
Brack in the Las Cruces courthouse. For federal districts that weren’t located
along the southwest border, U.S. District Judge Linda R. Reade sentenced the
largest number of defendants – a total of 1,070. Based in her Cedar Rapids
courtroom in the Northern District of Iowa, Judge Reade served as chief judge
until she retired on October 1, 2017. This new analysis about the varying
criminal workloads covers 917 federal district court judges who had sentenced
at least 50 defendants. The findings cover all active judges as well as senior
judges who had retired from the bench but still heard cases. Information is
available not only on each judge’s overall caseload, but by type of suit. Based
on both extensive internal government data as well as court records, the
research was carried out by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
(TRAC) at Syracuse University.
To view a listing providing info on the number of
defendants sentenced by each judge in all 94 federal judicial districts, go to
TRAC’s Judge Information Center at: http://tracfed.syr.edu/judges/interp/judgelist.html?tracdecor=1“
New Yorker – Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet How do we fix life online without limiting free speech? “Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people online go where you’d expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network? To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity.
New Yorker – Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet How do we fix life online without limiting free speech? “Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people online go where you’d expect them to go. The only truly surprising entry, in fourth place, is Reddit, whose astronomical popularity seems at odds with the fact that many Americans have only vaguely heard of the site and have no real understanding of what it is. A link aggregator? A microblogging platform? A social network? To its devotees, Reddit feels proudly untamed, one of the last Internet giants to resist homogeneity.
HIRED: Sludge,
a news site exposing the hidden influence of lobbyists and special interests,
has added four journalists to its team. Josefa Velasquez, formerly of POLITICO
and the New York Law Journal, will lead coverage around the 2018 midterm
elections, with a focus on statehouse lobbying. Jay Cassano, formerly of the
International Business Times and Fast Company, will focus on government secrecy
— specifically, how federal agencies are circumventing conventional ethics.
Alex Kotch, a contributor to the Young Turks, will follow dark money and how
nonprofits are being used for political advocacy. Roseann Cima, a Knight
Fellow, will enhance Sludge's campaign contribution analyses, especially around
tracking LLC contributions back to owners. Sludge is one of the first
newsrooms on the Civil
platform.