Tax Havens: Britain’s Second Empire
Nick Shaxson
In August 2012, the UK-based New Left Project published an article entitled "Britain's Second Empire," which involved an interview with the London-based academic Ronen Palan
KPMG, shooting itself in the foot
The September Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network
Inside Higher Ed, 'The Dangers of Fluent Lectures': How Smooth-Talking Professors Lull Students Into Thinking They've Learned More Than They Actually Have:
Times are getting tough at KPMG. As the FT has reported: KPMG has told hundreds of its UK employees to hand in their work mobiles
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Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC auditors escape scrutiny - The Australian Financial Review
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Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC auditors escape scrutiny - The Australian Financial Review
The September Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network
In this month’s Tax Justice Network Taxcast there’s discussion of a new vision for Europe amid, or in spite of the Brexit vortex. Plus: Britain’s
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Students who engage in active learning learn more — but feel like they learn less — than peers in more lecture-oriented classrooms. That's in part because active learning is harder than more passive learning, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Measuring Actual Learning Versus Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classroom). Based on their findings, the researchers encourage faculty members to intervene and correct what they call students' "misperception" about how they learn. ...
New York Law Journal, Williams & Connolly Defending Weil Gotshal Against Tax-Bungling Allegation:
Ex-Perella investment bankers Michael Kramer and Derron Slonecker, who are represented by Lisa Solbakken of Arkin Solbakken, accused Weil earlier this month of failing to disclose that the deferred-compensation forms at the center of their dispute with Perella didn’t comply with tax laws. Perella’s withholding of more than $10 million in deferred comp from the departed bankers was therefore invalid, they argued. ...
Weil sought to withdraw as counsel for Perella in the litigation this month after a report in the New York Post on Aug. 22 said Weil partners had concluded they risked being sued for malpractice over the advice they gave Perella. The Post reported that Weil may have given Perella bad advice by having Kramer and Slonecker sign their deferred-comp agreement amendments too late to avoid penalties under federal tax laws. ...
In a letter filed Tuesday, Villa said Kramer and Slonecker’s assertion that Weil had unethically withheld its thoughts on the tax issue was irrelevant and wrong.
Jeremy Pilaar (Yale), Making the Most of a BVT: Lessons From New Hampshire and Michigan, 92 State Tax Notes 703 (Aug. 19, 2019):
States' corporate income taxes (CITs) have become increasingly unreliable in the past 40 years. Scholars have traced this decline to three legal shifts. First, in an effort to channel profits to individual owners, such that they are only subject to personal income taxes, many businesses have abandoned C corporation status to operate as S corporations or limited liability companies. Second, in a rush to foster “entrepreneurial climates,” states have increased their business tax breaks and lowered their real CIT rates by more than 30 percent. Third, Public Law 86-272 has prevented any state from imposing net income taxes on out-of-state businesses that solicit in-state orders for delivery from out of state.
Your work emails contain subtle clues about your emotional state - Quartz – “Some corporations have always cared how their employees feel—if only because happier workers are more productive than those who are miserable. Others have only recently begun to wake up to the fact that they need to address wellbeing in meaningful ways. This focus raises a question: How can a company tell whether the people who work there are happy? A small Toronto-based company called Receptiviti is suggesting a tech solution. Unlike more traditional methods, like employee surveys, its method hinges entirely on analyzing the language used in employees’ everyday workplace communications, be that emails, Slack messages, or even voice. But what makes Receptiviti’s method interesting is that while it uses natural language processing, a branch of machine learning, to analyze language, it’s not sifting communications for sentiment. Rather, the company employs a branch of linguistic research that suggests passive parts of speech—the bits we use without thinking, like prepositions and pronouns—hold the key to how happy we are. Rather than looking at what people are saying to one another, it examines how they’re saying it…”
Politics of
the unmentionables, part 3: SexOH MY: Curiously, many parliamentary bipartisanship examples fall into the category of the unmentionables — including sex. Hamilton & Kells report.
In their paper, ‘Funny Evidence: Female Comics are the New Policy Entrepreneur’, Dr Christopher Pepin-Neff from The University of Sydney and Kristin Caporale from Assumption College, Worcester Massachusetts, argued that female comics can play an important role in policymaking. They can serve as policy entrepreneurs by using their identity to locate themselves as relevant actors, attaching solutions to problems, biasing political outcomes, benefiting from their engagement, and introducing narratives that change the emotional habitus of an audience and influence the broader public.
Company Culture: At a time when directors face increasing expectations in relation to their responsibility
for setting organisational culture and building trust, the importance of using words–
which align intent and impact–is critically important.
This is the main premise of Melinda Muth and Bob Selden’s Setting the Tone from
the Top, and its message could not be better timed.
The quality of the working relationships and conversation between the chair
and the CEO, and among directors and the CEO in the boardroom, at committee
meetings and in informal settings, is one of the strongest levers the board has to
influence culture.
Drawing on rigorous research and applied case studies, the authors challenge
boards to consider how the ‘rules of the game’ are transferred not just by having
good governance principles in place, but by how the board and senior management
describe what is meant by these in their day-to-day conversations.
Melinda Muth and Bob Selden have written a compelling must-read for any leader
looking to increase the effectiveness of their words and language, and the impact they
have on organisational culture. I recommend this book to all boards and executive
teams, as a powerful reflection on the evergreen question: Are we setting the right tone?