There are two pains in life. There is the pain of discipline and the pain of disappointment. If you can handle the pain of discipline, then you’ll never have to deal with the pain of disappointment.
Nick Saban
Nick Saban
Tax agents with an overdue return or debt are urged to contact the Australian Taxation Office to resolve these before the regulators take further action.
"The TPB and the ATO will continue to pursue those tax practitioners with outstanding tax obligations. This may include audits, investigations and prosecutions," the spokesperson said.
Chief executive of the tax practitioner's board, Michael O'Neill, said his office will continue to work closely with the ATO to identify "high risk" tax agents.
"From this the TPB is proposing to investigate between 30 and 50 practitioners to determine if the practitioners are still fit and proper," he said.
Tax Office out of 'love and affection' for business debt
The Australian Financial Review
Kim and Trump lookalikes cop a warning in Hanoi
Cars stopped and tourists gawked at what appeared to be North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wandering the streets of Hanoi.
Hangover: Cameron Gray collects a ton of tweets on the alleged Jussie Smollett attack that might not age well.
HEH: Heaven Has A Wall (Hell Doesn’t): Grocery Store Advertisement Stirs Controversy
with populism, I think one has to be a bit careful of always saying that’s a bad thing. You can also say populism is democracy and it’s a very elite term. But you can see how, within cultures with very strongly entrenched elites, the populist leader manages to find a way around. And you can see that in Trump’s use of Twitter, [which] has striking similarities with Julius Caesar’s direct appeal to the Roman people.
Two of my favorite films of the 1990s are about fictional U.S.
presidents: “The American President” and “Primary Colors.” So I really love this
well-done essay by The Ringer’s Kate Knibbs about how these two movies have
aged.
What Language Do They Speak In The Balkans? The Birth, Life, And Death Of Serbo-Croatian
“Imagine a situation in which an American defendant hires a British lawyer for a trial in an American courtroom. The accused then demands that a British interpreter be found. British-American legal interpreters are hard to find, so the demand could delay the case for years, … despite the fact that, obviously, a British lawyer is perfectly capable of being understood in an American courtroom. This actually happens on a regular basis in the countries that once made up Yugoslavia.” – Atlas Obscura
Sydney is expensive, but what people spend their money on might surprise you - ABC News
Sydney is expensive, but what people spend their money on might surprise you - ABC News
Redacted History: Tax Privacy and the KKK
By Sam Brunson
A year and a half ago, I learned that in the 1940s, the IRS revoked the Ku Klux Klan’s tax exemption and sued it for almost $700,000 in back taxes. Two years later, the IRS filed a tax lien against the KKK’s assets. While that may not have been thedeath blow to the 1920s iteration of the KKK, it was certainly part of the death blow.
I’ve since learned a lot more about the whole story, including how the KKK could claim exemption in the first place. I’ve read dozens of contemporary (and retrospective) newspaper articles about the revocation. Heck, I’ve read through a couple Stetson Kennedy archives. I’m dying to write an article about this piece of history.
There’s only one problem: I don’t know why the KKK lost its exemption.
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Eric Kades (William & Mary), Of Piketty and Perpetuities: Dynastic Wealth in the Twenty-First Century (and Beyond), 60 BC L. Rev. 145 (2019):
For the first time since independence, in a nation founded in large part on the rejection of a fixed nobility determined by birth and perpetuated by inheritance, America is paving the way for the creation of dynastic family wealth. Abolition of the Rule Against Perpetuities in over half the states along with sharp reductions in, and likely elimination of, the federal estate tax mean that there soon will be no obstacles to creating large pools of dynastic wealth insuring lavish incomes to heirs for generations without end. The timing of these legal changes could hardly be worse. Marshaling innovative economic data extending back centuries, Thomas Piketty has shown that the relatively egalitarian incomes enjoyed in developed economies from the end of World War II until around 1980 were an aberration and that we are in the process of returning to the historical norm of much greater income and wealth inequality. This Article shows, unhappily, that this revival of unending inherited wealth is of even greater concern than previously thought.
Emily Satterthwaite (Toronto), Electing Into a Value-Added Tax: Evidence From Ontario Microentrepreneurs, 66 Canadian Tax J. 761 (2018):
Why would an entrepreneur elect, on behalf of her business, to comply with a tax that is not required? A little-studied provision embedded in the majority of value-added tax (VAT) statutes worldwide permits otherwise exempt "small suppliers" (typically defined as businesses with annual revenues below a specified registration threshold) to register voluntarily for, collect, and remit VAT on their sales to customers. Economic models of the input credit mechanism that refunds registered sellers for the VAT that they pay on inputs show that incentives to register voluntarily for VAT increase as small suppliers (1) purchase more of their inputs from registered firms (the input channel) or (2) sell more of their output to registered firms (the customer channel). Promoting such "formality chain effects" through voluntary registration can improve the efficiency and self-enforcing properties of a VAT. In the real world, however, many VAT registration thresholds are far lower than the level recommended by economists. Low VAT thresholds imply that only the smallest businesses, which often bear disproportionately high VAT compliance costs, are eligible to opt in. But the question of whether formality chain effects are relevant for the key taxpayer population in low-threshold settings — microentrepreneurs — is an open one.
