Mandarin Editor's Note (It takes them a month what takes Media Dtagon few years to get): Allow us a small indulgence, we have some news of our own. The Mandarin clocked over 100,000 unique readers last month.
We are tremendously pleased to have become part of your public and
professional lives. Thank you for sticking with us.
Secondly,
long-time public sector columnist Verona
Burgess is returning to these pages this month. Please feel
free to email her column ideas and tips to vburgess@themandarin.com.au
Is
the employment use-by date changing?
OLDER WORKERS: Organisations are becoming more used to hiring older workers,
with some of the key markers of workplace ageism declining, according to a
major survey of human resources staff.
Adventurer endures 'trench foot', 'salt mouth' and losing chunks of tongue on 157-day record swim
Whistleblower Rudolf Elmer’s court victory: the long arm of Swiss secrecy law gets shorter
Chunfang Cao (Sun Yat-Sen University), C.S. Agnes Cheng (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Changyuan Xia (Southwestern University of Finance and Economics) & Cheng Zeng (University of Manchester), Corporate Tax Benefits from Politicians’ Hometown:
This paper investigates the impact of the geographic coincidence of firms and political leaders on corporate tax benefits. Taking advantage of a unique tax disclosure rule in China, which allows us to identify firm-specific tax benefits, we find that firms enjoy more favorable tax treatments if their registered city is the incumbent provincial leader’s hometown.
*New York Times, Happy ‘National Jealousy Day’! Finland Bares Its Citizens’ Taxes:
Shortly after 6 a.m. on Thursday, people began lining up outside the central office of the Finnish tax administration. It was chilly and dark, but they claimed their places, eager to be the first to tap into a mother lode of data.
Pamplona can boast of the running of the bulls, Rio de Janeiro has Carnival, but Helsinki is alone in observing “National Jealousy Day,” when every Finnish citizen’s taxable income is made public at 8 a.m. sharp.
*New York Times, Happy ‘National Jealousy Day’! Finland Bares Its Citizens’ Taxes:
John R. Brooks (Georgetown), Brian D. Galle (Georgetown) & Brendan S. Maher (Connecticut), Cross-Subsidies: Government's Hidden Pocketbook, 106 Geo. L.J. 1229 (2018):
Governments can use regulation to pay for public goods out of the pockets of consumers, rather than taxpayers. For example, the Affordable Care Act underwrites care for women and the infirm through higher insurance premium payments by healthy men. Building on a classic article from Richard Posner, we show that these “cross-subsidies” between consumers are a common feature of modern law, ranging from telecommunications to intellectual property to employee benefits.
Kathleen Delaney Thomas (North Carolina), Taxing the Gig Economy, 166 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1415 (2018):
Due to advances in technology like mobile applications and online platforms, millions of American workers now earn income through “gig” work, which allows them the flexibility to set their own hours and choose which jobs to take. To the surprise of many gig workers, the tax law considers them to be “business owners,” which subjects them to onerous recordkeeping and filing requirements, along with the obligation to pay quarterly estimated taxes. This Article proposes two reforms that would drastically reduce tax compliance burdens for this new generation of small business owners, while simultaneously enhancing the government’s ability to collect tax revenue.
How Writing ‘My Struggle’ Undid Knausgaard
The iconoclastic author, whose six-volume autobiographical novel is now complete in English, has lost his faith in radical self-exposure. What happened?