The Data Culture: Stormy seas ahead as TfNSW loses critical Opal Card privacy case

Europe cracks down on luxury yacht tax dodge, citing Paradise Papers

Pierre Moscovici, the EU’s commissioner for taxation, has started formal infringement procedures against Cyprus, Greece and Malta for allowing yacht owners to pay less tax than they should.

 

Will US tax agency nominee rein in offshore holdings?

Trump's pick to lead the tax agency has plenty of offshore experience, but where do his allegiances lie?

  
Web Analytics Wednesday Sydney

Stormy seas ahead as TfNSW loses critical Opal Card privacy case.
"A new case challenging the design of a public transport ticketing system on privacy grounds has broad implications for any organisation which collects personal information, especially in this age of Big Data." 

Professor Stephen Hawking has died, aged 76 

Australian government seeking digital identity credential-proofing

We Can Now Store Light as Sound, And It’s a Game Changer For Computing – Science Alert

IT failure brings Sydney Airport terminals to a halt

Mumbo Jumbo response to WestConnex tolling alchemy

To Big Pharma: Give us the data and we’ll give you the unvarnished truth

Now you see me, now you don’t: using citizenship and residency by investment to avoid automatic exchange of banking information


Verona Burgess: bursting the Canberra bubble easier said than done.
Overcoming the barriers to working in the APS outside the capital cities is proving harder than many realise.


Ben Rimmer: leadership is still the bureaucracy’s Achilles’ heel.
Too many secretaries are persevering with a dictator model. That’s not what the workforce, or customers, need, Ben Rimmer told The Mandarin

Low Value Tax - Economics Legislation Committee

GST on low value imported goods | Australian Taxation Office - ATO

LCR 2018/1 - GST on low value imported goods (As at 7 March 2018)

 

LCR 2018/3 - When is a redeliverer responsible for GST on a supply

Singapore Budget 2018 to introduce GST for Digital Economy

On the other hand, there are on-going international discussions on how GST can apply to imports of low-value goods. With the advent of technology, consumers in Singapore can buy overseas goods online and these goods are then imported into Singapore. Currently, the import relief for goods imported via ...

Transport for New South Wales told to stop trackingoldies, students

Full-fare payers can travel anonymously, but not concession-card holders

Richard Thaler, who has just been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, is considered one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics. When the University of Chicago professor sat down with MarketWatch to talk about his own research, why humans don’t behave the way economists say they should and his book “Misbehaving,” we asked him for reading recommendations such as Misbehaving Cold River - according the wise Owl Gill B 

Internet Archive Blogs: “The Internet Archive is a treasure trove of fascinating media, texts, and ephemera. Items that if they didn’t exist here, would be lost forever. Yet so many of our community members have difficulty describing what exactly it is…that we do here. Most people know us for the Wayback Machine, but we are so much more. To that end, we’ve put together a fun and useful guide to exploring the Archive. So, grab your flashlight and pith hat and let your digital adventure begin…

Article by John Hubbard – Librarian at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee – March 9, 2017. Misinformation Overload.

“We live in uncertain times. With big data and a boom in our ability to transmit ideas comes a seemingly greater amount of erroneous information, and therefore the need for everyone to be able to properly identify, discredit, and prevent the spread of falsehoods. What follows is a tour of how much the misrepresentation of reality pervades our world (from whimsical pranks and well-intentioned hoaxes to full-blown propaganda intended to defraud and manipulate), concluding with a discussion of tactics for taking a rational and scientific view so that we may both decrease our susceptibility and improve our ability to detect misinformation.”

John Hewson of Fightback fame:
I fear I will not live long enough to see genuine, broad-based tax reform in this country. We have had a number of exhaustive tax reviews – from Asprey in 1975 through to Henry in 2010 – and a number of partial attempts at fixing the system, but despite the fact governments know what needs to be done, there has never been the political will or leadership to do it.
Indeed, in attempting partial reform, governments have generally further complicated the system, and further undermined its “fairness”, making ultimate reform even more difficult.
If Politicians Can't Reform Tax System, We Need an Authority That Can

Despite some successful take-up, pension funds must invest more in financial technology to engage savers and help them understand their investments
Workplace pensions have been slow to join the financial technology revolution, lagging banking and insurance in areas such as data and analytics, according to research.
How fintech could future-proof pension funds

The Importance of Non-Tax Considerations in Estate Planning | Ross Polking ...

Campus Technology – David Raths – The secret to successful business intelligence is data governance and a metadata repository that connects data to standardized definitions across the campus. [h/t Pete Weiss]

“In 2015, the University of Washington began work on its own repository called the Knowledge Navigator, which is designed to give context to the enterprise data warehouse and allow business users to see relationships between concepts, terms, tables, columns and reports. “Someone who is exploring a business question such as how many women graduated with STEM degrees last year can find agreed-upon definitions of terms like STEM and then navigate to the database,” explained Matt Portwood, a UW metadata analyst. Most such repositories are designed for metadata management by data architects, noted Pieter Visser, a UW solutions architect. “They are not created for the end-user at all,” he said. In contrast, Knowledge Navigator was intended to be a tool for everybody. Visser described it as being like Google for your metadata: “We try to make it as easy as possible to find how everything is related to everything else. You can start with your business terms and go all the way to the Tableau visualization or web service, and we give you the context right away.” In their metadata repository work, both UW and Notre Dame use graph database technology from Neo4j to represent entities and their relationships. Visser explained that within the metadata world, everything is related to everything else. “A resource in a web service or a label on a report can relate to a business term or a concept,” he said. “In a graph database you can easily connect any node to another node. Trying to do it in a relational database is almost impossible.”…

Australia: Tax whack turns the solvent to insolvent!

Mondaq News Alerts-8 Mar. 2018

Preparation of the solvency report required the liquidators to consider the company's outstanding liabilities, including any liability to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Relevantly, the commercial property sale had generated a large capital gain

The tobacco black market is becoming increasingly violent 

... submission to a parliamentary inquiry into illicit tobacco late last year, saying both the ABF and ATO understate losses in duty due to the trade, which Mr Pike estimates to be near $4 billion. At the inquiry, Mr Pike intimated the federal government was focussed on penalising the legal tobacco industry through higher taxes

Kim Jong-un to meet Trump by May after North Korea invitation

Philippine president Duterte needs psychiatric evaluation, says UN chief

NextGov: “The Office of Personnel Management inspector general again found flaws in the agency’s contracting for the credit monitoring and ID theft services it provides to the more than 21.5 million current, former and prospective federal employees affected by the 2015 data breaches. OPM has gone through two different contracts for post-breach protections. The IG found “significant deficiencies” in the contracting process of the first one, a $20 million contract to Winvale Group and subcontractor CSID. When that contract expired, OPM opted for a contract with ID Experts to provide services for three years with a potential value of $330 million. In a report released Tuesday, auditors found the agency’s Office of Procurement Operations bypassed some of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the agencies’ purchasing rules for the ID Experts contract. The IG found 15 areas of noncompliance, such as designating the contracting officer representative after the award, failing to check the System for Award Management and data-entry errors. Auditors also found incomplete or unapproved contractual documents, including the acquisition plan, market research plan and technical evaluation plan. “Without a complete and accurate history of the actions taken to award the contract, it is impossible to know whether following all of the FAR requirements would have resulted in an award of the credit monitoring and identity theft services contract to someone other than ID Experts,” the report states…” 

Trump trade tariffs: what they mean for Australia and what happens next

The Real Data Culture - TF, MO'N – Use our videos, guides to run one activity a month at brown bag lunches in your org

“Today, my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I are pleased to launch the Data Culture Project. This is the latest evolution of our DataBasic.io work, now focused on helping organizations build a data culture in creative, hands-on ways. We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data? The Data Culture Project is a totally free and open source, remixable, hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization or community. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other. For those of you teaching data journalism, some of these activities and videos might be fun to use in the introductory period to help introduce new learners to concepts like quantitative text analysis, exploratory data visualization and more. Over the past year, we piloted the Data Culture Project with 25 organizations from around the world ranging from nonprofits to libraries to newsrooms. Check it out at http://datacultureproject.org, and you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/engagement-lab-emerson-college/launching-the-data-culture-project-59076c514c04.”
Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College. Faculty Director, Emerson Engagement Lab. Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media

In 2013, Vladimir Putin sent Donald Trump a gift. Trump had just flown home to New York from Moscow. He'd traveled to oversee the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned; Trump had tried and failed to meet the Russian leader while there. Now arrived a consolation prize of sorts. The daughter of Aras Agalarov, an oligarch known as "Putin's Builder" after amassing a billion-dollar-plus real estate empire, showed up at the Miss Universe offices in New York, bearing a box. "It was a black lacquered box," write journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette." "Inside was a sealed letter from the Russian autocrat. What the letter said has never been revealed." It's an intriguing jewel of a detail, not least because it hints at how much remains a mystery about Russia's ambitions and activity targeting Trump and the country he now leads. The House and Senate Intelligence committees launched their Russia probes more than a year ago. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team joined the fray last May; countless reporters have spent countless hours digging. Yet Russia, write Isikoff and Corn, remains "the original sin of [Trump's] presidency, a scandal that raise[s] questions about both his legitimacy and the nation's vulnerability to covert information warfare."
Book review of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn

We’re All Fascists Now - The New York Times
Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all



Ten years post-GFC we're still working. That's the good news.
"Just as many Australians of prime working age are employed now as in 2008 – but the workplace is greatly altered." (Guardian)