Media Dragon: TEDx Talk about taxation and everyone stayed awake

“Rich people don’t think, they just assume things. They assume everyone thinks the way they do.” Elmore Leonard, Split Images ... read more

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

HBOS – fraud, cover-up and consistent public exploitation Richard Murphy

Tax Returns Identify Dark Money Organization As Source of GOP Supreme Court Attacks MapLight

Mike West Gold of Independent Views https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelwestbiz?lang=en

Ali Noroozi will not seek a third term as the IGT 09/07/2018

The objective of this audit is to assess the effectiveness of the Phoenix Taskforce to combat illegal phoenix activities.
ANAO Annual Audit Work Program 2018-19:
https://www.anao.gov.au/work-program

This week, Australia began levying tax penalties on parents who don't fully vaccinate their children.

↩︎ news.com.au

UK.gov told: You're not very good at collecting quality data, are you?

Spending watchdog's report also has barbs for outsourcing and, of course, Brexit

The Hill op-ed: Free File Providers Scam Taxpayers; Congress Shouldn't Be Fooled, by Dennis J. Ventry, Jr. (UC-Davis):

In April, the House unanimously passed the Taxpayer First Act, including a provision to codify the IRS Free File Program.

Making Free File a permanent part of the tax law would mean that the IRS and its private-sector Free File partners — organized as the Free File Alliance (FFA) and including Intuit and H&R Block — would no longer periodically renegotiate the terms and conditions of the program.

For that reason alone — i.e., preventing the IRS from verifying that FFA companies deliver free tax filing services as promised — codifying Free File is a terrible idea.

Dashiell C. Shapiro (Wood LLP, San Francisco), Cryptocurrency and the Shifting IRS Enforcement Model, 1 Stan. Blockchain L. & Pol'y ___ (2018):

This Article reviews the IRS’s previous enforcement models, and considers how these have shifted in recent decades. The IRS has increasingly moved away from a purely punitive system towards one that focuses on customer service, the theory being that a procedurally fair system will increase taxpayer satisfaction and voluntary compliance. Given the IRS’s steady shift to a more holistic tax enforcement approach, the Author believes that the IRS is likely to take a broad-based approach to cryptocurrency tax enforcement.

That is the topic of a new paper by Diego Comin and Martí Mestieri, published in AEJ: Macroeconomics, here is the abstract:

We study the cross-country evolution of technology diffusion over the last two centuries. We document that adoption lags between poor and rich countries have converged, while the intensity of use of adopted technologies of poor countries relative to rich countries has diverged. The evolution of aggregate productivity implied by these trends in technology diffusion resembles the actual evolution of the world income distribution in the last two centuries. Cross-country differences in adoption lags account for a significant part of the cross-country income divergence in the nineteenth century. The divergence in intensity of use accounts for the divergence during the twentieth century.

I am struck by the strength of the two major stylized facts in this paper. The mean adoption lag for spindles, classified as a 1779 technology, was 130 years, or in other words that is how long it took for the technology to move to poorer countries. For ships, listed as a 1788 technology, the mean lag is 110 years. Synthetic fiber is a 1931 technology, with a mean adoption lag of 29 years. For the internet, a 1983 technology (is that right?), the mean adoption lag is only 6 years.

But the overall story is not so simple. The more advanced countries use more of these technologies, and use them more effectively (“intensity”), and that gap has been growingover time. Yes, Ghana has the internet, but it is Silicon Valley that is working wonders with it. Some technology use begs more technology use.

New York Times op-ed: How to Make Trump’s Tax Returns Public, by David Cay Johnston:

On June 14, the New York State attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed a civil complaint against President Trump and his three oldest children, accusing them of “persistently illegal conduct” in using the Donald J. Trump Foundation as “little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality."

Ms. Underwood believes there is abundant evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr. Trump as well. She made that position very clear in the letters she sent to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission in Washington recommending “further investigation and legal action." ...

A state or county criminal investigation that begins with abuse of the Donald J. Trump Foundation need not be limited to violations of charity and election law. It can also examine his personal and business tax filings and, in the process, lawfully put his tax returns in the public record.

For Second Time, Wildenstein Family Of Art Dealers Cleared Of Tax Fraud Charges

"In fewer than five minutes in a Paris appeals courtroom on Friday, June 29, the surviving members of the art-dealing Wildenstein clan were cleared, for a second time, of defrauding French tax authorities out of millions of euros. The presiding judge in Paris's court of appeals upheld the decision reached after a previous trial in January 2017." … [Read More]

A lot can happen in 26 years.

But if it wasn’t for the smart people who make up our data team, that’s how long it would’ve taken reporters to read each file for just one minute in the Paradise Papers.

Our chief technology officer Pierre Romera and our data journalist Cecile Gallego explain how they made the mammoth processing task possible. They might make it sound simple with their four points, but it took a lot of work and brilliance!

Not only was security a massive issue (hot tip: encrypt everything) but our engineers had to find a way to make millions of emails and PDFs searchable by reporters. We also used some cool technology to turn millions of data points (names, addresses, etc) into a visual graph.

Equally, it is no easy task to take readers on a journey through complex offshore structures being deployed to confuse people. But that’s what ICIJ reporter Simon Bowers did in his latest TEDx Talk in Glasgow.

His talk really is a must-watch. And I’m not alone in saying that. Here’s one comment from an audience member: “Despite being about taxation, I did not slip into a coma.”

I gave a TEDx Talk about taxation and everyone stayed awake

Explaining the contortions that multinational corporations put themselves through to avoid taxes is a journalistic challenge. Here’s one way to overcome it.

How ICIJ deals with huge data dumps like the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers

Often we face the challenge of digging through gigantic amounts of data. Here’s how we make this endeavor more efficient and less time consuming.

ICIJ’s deputy director is one of 2018’s ‘Great Immigrants’

New York Times op-ed: If Ronaldo Can’t Beat Uruguay, the Least He Can Do Is Pay Taxes, by Gabriel Zucman (UC-Berkeley):

Ronaldo, who plays for Real Madrid, had acknowledged evading 14.7 million euros (about $17.1 million) in taxes between 2011 and 2014. That’s enough to pay for 800 full-time Spanish primary-school teachers for one year or to treat 1,000 patients with breast cancer.

And Ronaldo is far from an isolated case. In 2017, his archrival, Lionel Messi of Argentina — who plays for FC Barcelona — was given a 21-month prison sentence (which was changed to $2.5 million in fines) for the same crime.

In both cases, the Spanish authorities found the players guilty of dodging taxes on the income derived from their image rights. These rights — which they, like many other professional athletes, had transferred to shell companies in exotic tax havens — account for a large part of their income. For the top players on the planet, such rights can amount to many millions of dollars a year.

That some of the world’s most famous athletes could defraud tax authorities seems at first incomprehensible: They should know that their tax returns will be closely scrutinized, and being labeled tax evaders certainly does not enhance the value of their image or their popularity with fans.