Monday, October 22, 2018

Universal Wealth Management: More than 100 possible frauds

Overall, the complexity of the tax code leads to perverse results. On the one hand, taxpayers who honestly seek to comply with the law often make inadvertent errors, causing them to either overpay their tax or become subject to IRS enforcement action for mistaken underpayments. On the other hand, sophisticated taxpayers often find arcane provisions that enable them to reduce or eliminate their tax liabilities.
Nina E. Olson

Via Les Patterson ... trends and patterns - Germany wants to halt us tech giant tax evasion report 

Digital tax to target tech giants being considered by the Australian ...

 

Quote Details: Czech Proverb: The big thieves hang the little ones ...




“And I will leave you with this thought………..” from a farewell note of LC  ✍️


How the UK can raise £2.5bn from tax-avoiding multinationals today



Coalition suppressed auditor's finding on $1.3bn Thales arms deal
"French group asked attorney general to use extraordinary powers to black out sections of report that criticised the deal." (The Guardian)

 

Review into the ATO’s Fraud Control Management

The report of the IGT’s review into the ATO’s fraud control management has been publicly released


Tax watchdog calls for improved transparency in wake of police probe
ATO FRAUD REPORT: A report into fraud within the ATO has recommended the conduct of senior officers receive more robust scrutiny after Operation Elbrus.
 


Review calls on ATO to better manage conflicts of interest post Cranston scandal and tax fraud investigation




Bags of cash totalling $100,000 brought into an office to buy a suburban home. Fees for 457 visas for bogus jobs. Companies phoenixed by the dozen




Lawmakers enact tax laws to raise revenue, redistribute resources, and change behavior. The ability of a tax law to serve its goals depends on how individuals respond to the tax law, and how individuals respond to the tax law can depend on how it interacts with other laws. This article unearths unrecognized connections between the operations of tax law on the one hand and the voluntary nature of public assistance programs on the other.


Manhire (2018)Jack Manhire (Texas A&M) presents Constraints on IRS Control: An Alternative Approach to Tax Gap Analysis, 12 Int’l J. L. & Pol. Sci. ___ (2018) at the World Academy of Science, Engineering, and Technology’s 20th International Conference on Tax Law and Regulations today in London, England.
A tax authority wants to take actions it knows will foster the greatest degree of voluntary taxpayer compliance to reduce the "tax gap." This paper suggests that even if a tax authority could attain a state of complete knowledge, there are constraints on whether and to what extent such actions would result in reducing the macro-level tax gap. These limits are not merely a consequence of finite agency resources. They are inherent in the system itself. To show that this is one possible interpretation of the tax gap data, the paper formulates known results in a different way by analyzing tax compliance as a population with a single covariate. This leads to a standard use of the logistic map to analyze the dynamics of non-compliance growth or decay over asequence of periods.

David Cay Johnston, We Need Tax Police – And They Should Go After the Likes of Donald Trump:
When the New York Times exposed decades of tax cheating and “outright fraud” by the sitting president, it prompted people to ask important questions about the corrupt practices of the Trump family. The answers are central to the future of America.
Where was the Internal Revenue Service? How did the Trumps get away with decades of schemes the Times said allowed them to evade close to a half-billion dollars of income and gift taxes? Is Donald Trump continuing these practices? Is that why he refuses to make his own tax returns public? Can anything be done about it?
I’m in a unique position to answer those questions. I am the Times’ former tax reporter, the journalist who has covered Trump longer than anyone else, more than 30 years. ...
Congress, which makes tax law, has never properly supported the IRS, which I like calling the Tax Police Department.

Deserted in the desert: When even allies ditch the Saudi crown prince

In revulsion, the world keeps telling impulsive, immature Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman it wants no relationship with someone who may have launched a fatal operation on a journalist.
On Thursday, some of his closest allies checked out, and Twitter bounced the phony troll network that tried to defend him.
Fox Business Network, the last North American media partner and co-sponsor for a crumbling Saudi business conference dubbed the "Davos of the Desert," pulled out Thursday. The announcement came hours after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin withdrew as well, following CEOs and representatives from other nations. 
The reason? The disappearance of distinguished Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, and persistent reports that the crown prince was behind the death. On Thursday, President Trump told The New York Times that he believed Khashoggi was killed, and that high-level Saudi authorities had a role in the journalist’s killing.
Twitter took action — what it called a routine spam operation takedown — on hundreds of accounts spreading malicious and false information about Khashoggi and defending Mohammed bin Salman, NBC News reported.
Some of those Saudi royal distortions have made their way to U.S. conservative outlets and are being spread privately by hard-line Republican members of Congress, The Washington Post reported.
“It may not be surprising that some Saudi-inspired trolls are now trying to distract us from the crime by smearing Jamal,” said Post Editorial Editor Fred Hiatt. “It may not even be surprising to see a few Americans joining in. But in both cases it is reprehensible.”