Latest from Geoffrey A. Fowler
As many as 4 million people have Web browser extensions that sell their every click. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Prime Minister has released a statement announcing that Dr Martin Parkinson AC PSM will conclude his tenure as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on 30 August 2019. As many of you know, Martin has had a distinguished career in the Australian Public Service, including as Treasury Secretary and Secretary of the Department of Climate Change.
Treasury Secretary Departure
Brexiteer 'dream team' takes power as PM Johnson purges the unbelievers
- By Nick Miller
Bernie Madoff asks Trump to shorten his 150-year prison sentenceBy Michael Gold
'Teflon-like': Facebook's latest profits show $7b fine is just a blip
- by Marie C. Bacaand Elizabeth Dwoskin
ABC Local
Former Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale guilty on extortion charges - Courier Mail
Japan To Lead Development of SWIFT Network For Cryptocurrency Reuters
Willing to pay for security: Gig workers, freelancers, and the self-employed want steady jobs
VOX, 19 July 2019. Is the rise of ‘atypical’ work arrangements – such as self-employment, freelancing, gig work and zero-hour contracts – a result of workers wanting such jobs or because they have no other choice? This column reports evidence from the UK and the US that while atypical workers may like flexibility, they would prefer a steady job. Indeed, workers would agree to earn less in order to increase their employment security.
Nature – A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal? – “Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories.
Bloomberg Tax, The More, the Better: San Francisco Leads New Kind of Tax Revolt:
In recent weeks:
- San Francisco leaders supported the proposed overhaul of the city’s gross receipts tax structure, which would be the fourth tax-raising proposal on the city’s November ballot.
- A San Francisco Superior Court judge upheld an initiative raising commercial lease taxes to fund early childhood education and upheld a Salesforce.com-backed initiative imposing gross receipts taxes on companies earning more than $50 million to support homeless services.
- A pair of recent court rulings upheld locally passed tax initiatives—including one backing the city’s authority to seek taxes from drivers who use paid parking lots at state universities—which could embolden tax enthusiasts in San Francisco even more.
“I think SF is going to be the poster child, one way or another, for aggressively looking for money from business,” Joseph Bankman, Stanford University professor of law and business, said. ...
San Francisco is emerging as one of the most receptive places in the country for new taxes. In recent weeks:
- San Francisco leaders supported the proposed overhaul of the city’s gross receipts tax structure, which would be the fourth tax-raising proposal on the city’s November ballot.
- A San Francisco Superior Court judge upheld an initiative raising commercial lease taxes to fund early childhood education and upheld a Salesforce.com-backed initiative imposing gross receipts taxes on companies earning more than $50 million to support homeless services.
- A pair of recent court rulings upheld locally passed tax initiatives—including one backing the city’s authority to seek taxes from drivers who use paid parking lots at state universities—which could embolden tax enthusiasts in San Francisco even more.
Bridget C.E. Dooling (George Washington), Expanding OIRA Review to IRS, 3 J. Bus. Entrepreneurship & L. ___ (2019):
Executive Order 12866 describes U.S. policy on regulatory planning and review. It directs agencies to identify the nature and significance of the problem they are trying to solve with regulation, to identify alternative solutions, to assess the quantifiable and non-quantifiable costs and benefits of each alternative, and then to choose the option that maximizes net benefits to society, taking into account distributional effects and other considerations. That policy, which has governed U.S. regulation for several decades, is managed by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). It is also subject to several exemptions. In April 2018, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget signed a historic memorandum of agreement (MOA) narrowing one of those exemptions. The MOA expands the number of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulatory actions for which IRS must comply with EO 12866. This action moved tax rules out of the “presidential tax-policy blind spot” as described by Professor Clint Wallace [Centralized Review of Tax Regulations, 70 Ala. L. Rev. 455, 460 (2018)].
Bloomberg Tax, Fifty Years, Little Progress for Black Accountants:
One was a partner in the practice who served as a mentor to Groves. She, too, had been involved in an extended internship program that Groves participated in through high school and college, introducing him to the world of a Big Four accounting firm.
Those experiences served as the foundation of a career that quickly led to a corporate job and later the launch of Grove’s own tax and accounting firm, which today features a staff of 11 who reflect all of America’s major racial groups: white, Hispanic, Asian, and black. That diversity gives clients the chance to seek an accountant who looks like them or prefer to communicate with his Spanish-speaking colleagues.
But the accounting profession as a whole isn’t nearly as diverse as Grove’s Houston practice. Roughly 9% of all 1.9 million accountants and auditors in the U.S. are black, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In comparison, roughly 13% of all U.S. residents are black, according to census figures.
'Spy shop' surveillance gear cheaper than ever, but you get what you pay for
In the age of Alexa surveillance gadgets have moved from corporate espionage to being easily accessible to everyone.
Building Trust Online How to Adapt Mediation and Negotiation ...
The purpose of this empirical research is to examine the extent to which parties can trust a mediator when communicating in a video-collaborated environment known as telepresence.
Wired: “If you wanted to send a tweet using Mayan hieroglyphics, or call upon the Phaistos disc symbols to craft the perfect email reply, you would have the Unicode Consortium to thank. The nonprofit encodes languages for the digital age, preserving them in amber for their onscreen afterlife. They have rescued, for the internet, Meroitic cursive, Canadian syllabics, the Lydian scripts, and those most esoteric creatures, emoji. “From English and Chinese to Cherokee and Rohingya, Unicode is committed to preserving every language for the digital era,” says Mark Davis, Unicode’s president and cofounder. Thanks to the adoption of emoji, Unicode’s star has been steadily rising for the past decade. Its web design, however, has been stuck in biblical times. Or, at least, the biblical times of the web: the 1990s…”
Have We Hit Peak Podcast - The New York Times – If past experience (cough, blogs) is any indication, a shakeout is nigh. – “…Call him cynical, but Jordan Harbinger, host of “The Jordan Harbinger Show” podcast, thinks there is a “podcast industrial complex.” Hosts aren’t starting shows “because it’s a fun, niche hobby,” he said. “They do it to make money or because it will make them an influencer.”
Rich people's problems - If America introduces a ... - The Economist
NSW launches whole-of-government identity recovery service
The NSW Government is to launch an identity recovery service for customers who have been hit by "cyber incidents".
Delivered through IDCARE, the State Government will now offer 500 NSW referrals to the service by all its agencies and departments, with the roll-out costing $65,000.
Will ID Crime Become Siloless in NSW? State Examining Whole of Government Approach
Note also international trend via NextGov – The General Services Administration gives a first look at the new Unique Entity ID, the validation system that will replace the long-standing DUNS number
Do criminals dream of electric sheep: how technology shapes the future of crime and law enforcement
New report triggers discussion about innovation and strategic foresight in EU policing
Europol’s Executive Director, Catherine De Bolle, said: “Europol’s strategy sets out our ambition to firmly establish Europol as an innovator in law enforcement at the European level. It is no longer good enough to be reactive. Our ability to predict which emerging technologies criminals will turn to next is instrumental to our mission of keeping EU citizens safe. We hope to start a discussion with law enforcement in the Member States and other stakeholders.”
Download the full report "Do criminals dream of electric sheep: how technology shapes the future of crime and law
Workforce and Workplace Trends: The Empirical Challenges and Policy Significance
By Diane Ring
On Thursday, my co-author (Shu-Yi Oei) and I had the opportunity to present on “Tax Related Challenges for Platform Workers” at the United States Government Accountability Office in downtown Boston. We enjoyed discussing our past and current research regarding taxation, platform workers, labor and emerging workforce trends with GAO researchers.
Our talk at GAO was particularly timely because we’re in the process of writing a book chapter for a new empirical volume, tentatively entitled “The Law and Policy of the Gig Economy: Qualitative Analysis,” which is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press (ed. Deepa Das Acevedo). This volume will address the promise of qualitative empirical approaches to studying the gig economy. Our contribution will build on our previous work in which we looked at the public online conversations among Uber and Lyft drivers regarding challenges they face in tax compliance.
Even without considering the impacts of the 2017 Tax Reform on both the gig economy and the broader workforce (which we have examined here, here and here), significant empirical questions remain regarding the tax and economic pressures faced by gig and contingent workers. Some, but not all, of those questions can be addressed by examining tax return and survey data. Add in tax reform to the mix (think the new section 199A deduction, the suspension of employee business deductions and the offshoring international provisions (section 250 and 956A)) and it’s clear we have a lot of work to do to better understand the interplay between tax and labor policies across many fields and how this will impact the future of the workplace. Our view is that it will take a combination of empirical approaches to get a well-textured picture of how tax impacts work.
ATO change eases the sale of deceased estates
Phil Gaetjens promoted to head of PM&C, Dr Steven Kennedy to lead Treasury
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said an acting secretary would step into Kennedy’s role at DITCRD after the reshuffle, which is to follow the early retirement of Dr Martin Parkinson next month.
“Phil has 40 years of experience — state, and at federal level. He’s been more closely involved in central-agency planning and budgets than most people around this town, at all levels — again, at state and at federal level,” Morrison said.
“How we work with state governments is absolutely critical to my agenda.
“As you know, I’ve worked closely with Phil in the past and I’m looking forward to working closely with him again, and I’m looking forward to what he will bring to the government’s agenda and ensuring it’s well understood across the public service and that we’re getting on with the job of delivering on that agenda.”
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