~ extract from twitter 15 Towns without water and Australia needs more migrants to fill Mereton Appartment
Lederman: The Fraud Triangle And Tax Evasion - TaxProf Blog
Cash, Crime, and Cryptocurrencies by Joshua R. Hendrickson ... - SSRN
Drivers of the fatal drug epidemic Journal of Health Economics
It’s time for Britain to force its tax havens to be transparent
- Theft of intellectual property by Chinese companies is a major point of contention between the Trump administration and Chinese government.
- Just under one-third of CFOs of North America-based companies on the CNBC Global CFO Council say Chinese firms have stolen from them at some point during the past decade.
- U.S. trade policy remains a negative for businesses around the world, but right now European CFOs are expressing the biggest concerns about trade policy as an external risk factor…”
Antipodean Vaclav Havel in the making?
Jennifer Game becomes a SA senate candidate for One Nation
“In a live Facebook broadcast, the One Nation leader teamed up with former Australian Tax Office official Jennifer Game to demand an end to an ineffective profits-based tax regime in return for the imposition of royalties across the entire offshore gas sector and for the introduction of shared production arrangements, which would amount to part-nationalisation of the gas fields.
One Nation and ...
One of the officers was Jennifer Game, Wickenby's Director of Secrecy. Boucher is the brother of former tax commissioner Trevor Boucher
Whistleblower facing 161 years in jail had his claims rejected by ATO
ATO whistleblower's case highlights need for reform
Robert Gottliebsen - small business needs a fair tax appeal system
THE WORST GOVERNMENT FOR A SOCIALIST IS ONE CONTROLLED BY SOCIALISTS WHO ARE NOT HIS FRIENDS: Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, team detained, released in Venezuela, network says
TIGTA’s Report on the Growing Gig Economy
By: Joseph C. Dugan, Trial Attorney, Department of Justice, Civil Division*
On February 14, 2019, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a Valentine’s Day treat: a comprehensive report following a TIGTA audit concerning self-employment tax compliance by taxpayers in the emerging “gig economy.”
As Forbes noted last year, over one-third of American workers participate in the gig economy, doing freelance or part-time work to supplement their regular incomes or stringing together a series of “gigs” to displace traditional employment. Popular gig services include ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft; arts-and-crafts hub Etsy; food delivery services GrubHub and Postmates; and domestic support networks Care.com and TaskRabbit. Even Amazon.com, the second-largest retailer in the world and a traditional employer to many thousands of workers in Seattle and at Amazon distribution centers worldwide, has gotten in on the gig economy with its Amazon Flex service. And for those interested in more professional work experience to pad their resumes, Fiverr connects businesses with freelance copywriters, marketers, and graphic designers. The power of smartphones and social media, coupled with flat wage growth in recent years, makes the digital side hustle appealing and, for many households, necessary.
From a tax revenue perspective, the gig economy is great: it is creating billions of dollars of additional wealth and helping to replenish government coffers that the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has left a little emptier than usual. From a tax compliance perspective, however, the gig economy presents new challenges. Gig payers generally treat their workers as independent contractors, which means that the payers do not withhold income tax and do not pay the employer portion of FICA. Instead, the contractor is required to remit quarterly estimated income tax payments to the IRS and to pay the regressive self-employment tax, which works out to 15.3% on the first $128,400 in net earnings during TY2018, and 2.9% to 3.8% on additional net earnings. That self-employment tax applies even for low-income freelancers (i.e., it cannot be canceled out by the standard deduction or nonrefundable credits). Continue reading
- UK MPs in renewed attempt to force money laundering crackdown (1 Mar 2019)
- Why Amazon May Pay No Federal Income Taxes This Year (1 Mar 2019)
- Group action on £1bn tax avoidance 'E' Share losses scheme (1 Mar 2019)
- European Commission warns Britain over dividend tax avoidance (1 Mar 2019)
- EU blocked on dirty money blacklist that angered Saudis, US (1 Mar 2019)
- Shell to be prosecuted for bribery in Nigeria (1 Mar 2019)
- Spain's Watergate: inside the corruption scandal that changed a nation (1 M
- State aid: EU Commission opens in-depth investigation into public financing of Øresund fixed rail-road link- Denmark and Sweden under scrutiny (1 Mar 2019)
- Millions of Ugandans quit internet services as social media tax takes effect (28 Feb 2019)
- GM hasn't paid US income tax for years; Ford rarely does (28 Feb 2019)
- Cyprus' golden visas display traits of a tax haven, say MEPs (28 Feb 2019)
- Belgium has traits of a tax haven, European Parliament commission finds (28 Feb 2019)
- Neoliberalism cloaked as modernity (28 Feb 2019)
- EU states move toward possible rejection of money-laundering blacklist (28 Feb 2019)
- Venice approves tourist tax of £2.50 for daytrippers (28 Feb 2019)
- Michael Cohen Explains The 'Real Reason' Trump Is Hiding His Tax Returns (28 Feb 2019)
- Father targeted by tax avoidance crackdown committed suicide (28 Feb 2019)
- Mozambique files case against Credit Suisse over debt deals (28 Feb 2019)
- Governments use receipt lotteries to boost tax compliance (28 Feb 2019)
- Corporate Welfare: Outrage as help-to-buy boosts Persimmon profits to £1bn (26 Feb 2019)
The Economist is running an article about a fairly new body called Tax Inspectors Without Borders (TIWB), a programme backed by the OECD and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to provide tax assistance to hard-pressed revenue authorities in poorer countries, whose underpaid officials struggle to match the awesome legal and accounting firepower of the world’s multinationals.
This is a vast issue: IMF research estimates that global profit-shifting by multinationals cheats the world’s treasuries out of around $600 billion a year, while TJN estimates $500 billion annually. Although high-income countries are the biggest losers in absolute terms, it is lower-income countries that are taking the biggest hit in terms of the share of lost revenue – which means that the likely human cost is highest in these places.
Design historian Steven Heller collects vintage letterheads and shares some examples at Design Observer.
Making a difference with data driven
decision-making
– Amanda L. Brown, Esq., Legal Technology Consultant, Louisiana
Legal Aid Navigator Project, Louisiana Bar Foundation – shares her experience
on how using technology is an effective way to bridge
the justice gap, and supports this
position by demonstrating how data-driven
decisions are used to help shine a light on where the needs are to ensure that
efforts are then appropriately channeled from the start.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: Study: Low-T Men Are Angry and Moody. “Many people still think that testosterone will cause you to kill your parents and run over small woodland creatures. But paradoxically, it’s often men with low testosterone levels that are moody, depressed, and even angry, while men with normal or high testosterone levels are generally sociable and gregarious. Dr. Christina Wang of UCLA found that men with low T were likely to be snarkier and more aggressive than men with high T, but once the snarky ones received T replacement, their attitude and anger disappeared.”
It certainly explains Buzzfeed.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Smollett has shown that the most absurd narratives imaginable will continue to gain credence because they fill a deep psychological, cultural—and, yes, careerist—need for millions in the country to believe that hate crimes are epidemic, that they are the currency of the Right, and that they can only be addressed by more government scrutiny of a particular class of victimizers such as the Duke Lacrosse team, the Covington kids, or Smollett’s mythic red-hatted Trump racists.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Smollett has shown that the most absurd narratives imaginable will continue to gain credence because they fill a deep psychological, cultural—and, yes, careerist—need for millions in the country to believe that hate crimes are epidemic, that they are the currency of the Right, and that they can only be addressed by more government scrutiny of a particular class of victimizers such as the Duke Lacrosse team, the Covington kids, or Smollett’s mythic red-hatted Trump racists.”
The upper echelon is hoarding money and privilege to a degree not seen in decades. But that doesn’t make them happy at work.
My First charmed week as a student at Harvard Business School, late in the summer of 2001, felt like a halcyon time for capitalism. AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and Napster were benevolently connecting the world. Enron and WorldCom were bringing innovation to hidebound industries. President George W. Bush — an H.B.S. graduate himself — had promised to deliver progress and prosperity with businesslike efficiency.
New York Times: Don’t Fight the Robots. Tax Them., by Eduardo Porter:
Many companies invest in automation because the tax code encourages it, not because robots are more productive.
When Bill Gates floated the idea of imposing a tax on robots a couple of years ago, Lawrence Summers, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, called the Microsoft co-founder “profoundly misguided.” How do you even define a robot to tax it? And taxing innovation is a sure way to make a country poorer. Europe has also rejected the idea. In 2017 the European Parliament soundly defeated a draft motion, proposed by its committee on legal affairs, that recommended considering a tax on the owners of robots to fund retraining programs for workers displaced by the machines and shore up the finances of their social security system.
And yet properly constructed, a tax on automation may not be as destructive as it sounds. South Korea, the most robotized country in the world, instituted a robot tax of sorts in 2018 when it reduced the tax deduction on business investments in automation.
There are two sound arguments for taxing robots.
Michael Simkovic (USC), After Paying Ultra-High Net Worth Wealth Taxes, How Much Would Billionaires Have Left to Live On?:
How much can someone investing passively, but with a high-risk tolerance, earn on their capital?
If history since the end of World War 2 is any guide, between 11 and 14 percent per year before taxes and inflation. After inflation, this comes to around 7 to 10 percent. With good tax planning, the rate of return net of income taxes, inflation, and fees could average around 6.5 to 9.5 percent per year.
A family with $100,000,000 ($100 million) in wealth would pay an additional $1 million in taxes per year under Senator Elizabeth Warren’s ultra-high-networth tax proposal. That would reduce their after-tax disposable income to $5.5 million to $8.5 million per year.
