Underworld figure faces court after 2017 Dubai arrest over drug ring
A Sydney underworld figure arrested in Dubai in 2017, during one of the largest crackdowns on organised crime in Australia, has been extradited to face an Australian court
'50 by 50': Wanting to get rich, lawyer launders $588m in crypto scam
Reducing water use is bad for the water business: $500m revenue scandal
Future of tax administration at OECD Paris
Jeremy Hirschhorn, Second Commissioner, Client Engagement
Author who tried to help mystery prisoner publish memoir hits out at secret trials
Police sting seizes nearly $175,000 cache of baby formula, other products
Three people have been arrested across Sydney's south-west, putting an end to a large-scale spate of thefts.
Reducing water use is bad for the water business: $500m revenue scandal
While leaky old pipes lose 110 million litres a day, the NSW government will slug households rather than invest its huge dividend from Sydney Water.
Future of tax administration at OECD Paris
Jeremy Hirschhorn, Second Commissioner, Client Engagement
Report of IRS Criminal Interest in Captive Insurance Shelters
RICO Claim Dismissed Against Bullshit Tax Shelter Promoters
In Menzies v. Seyfarth Shaw LLP, __ F.3d ___ (7th Cir. 2019), here, the Court dismissed a RICO claim arising out of an alleged fraudulent tax shelter peddled to the taxpayer (Menzies) by a lawyer, law firm and two financial services firms. The Court held that fraudulent tax shelters can be subject of RICO claims, but Menzies had failed to properly assert the claims in the pleadings. The particular shelter involved was of the bullshit shelters, often a topic discussed on this blog. Here is my definition from my Tax Procedure books (Practitioner Edition p. 905 (footnotes omitted); Student Edition p. 616):
Abusive tax shelters are many and varied. Some are outright fraudulent, usually wrapped in a shroud of paper work and cascade of words designed to mask the shelter as a real deal. The more sophisticated are often without substance but do have some at least attenuated, if superficial, claim to legality. Some of the characteristics that I have observed for tax shelters that the Government might perceive as abusive are that (i) the transaction is outside the mainstream activity of the taxpayer, (ii) the transaction is incredibly complex in its structure and steps so that not many (including IRS auditors, if they stumble across the transaction(s)) will have the ability, tenacity, time and resources to trace it out to its illogical conclusion (this feature is often included to increase the taxpayer’s odds of winning the audit lottery); (iii) the transaction costs of the arrangement and risks involved, even where large relative to the deal, offer a favorable cost benefit/ratio only because of the tax benefits to be offered by the audit lottery, (iv) the promoters (and other enablers) of the adventure make a lot more than even an hourly rate even at the high end for professionals (the so-called value added fee, which is often insurance type compensation to mediate potential penalty risks by shifting them to the tax professional or the netherworld between the taxpayer and the tax professional) and (v) the objective indications as to the taxpayer's purpose for entering the transaction are a tax savings motive rather than any type of purposive business or investment motive.
More succinctly, Michael Graetz, a Yale Law Professor, has described an abusive tax shelter as “[a] deal done by very smart people that, absent tax considerations, would be very stupid.” Other thoughtful observers vary the theme, e.g. a tax shelter “is a deal done by very smart people who are pretending to be rather stupid themselves for financial gain.” Others have described the abusive tax shelters as “too good to be true.”
Inside Higher Ed, When CVs Are Too Good to Be True:
When we think about academic misconduct, we tend to think about misrepresentation of research findings or plagiarism. But a new study says that misrepresentation of academic achievements on CVs is a problem requiring attention, too [Trisha Phillips (West Virginia), R. Kyle Saunders (Florida State), Jeralynn Cossman (West Virginia) & Elizabeth Heitman (Texas),Assessing Trustworthiness in Research: A Pilot Study on CV Verification].
For their experiment, the researchers collected each and every curriculum vitae submitted for all faculty positions at a large, purposely unnamed research university over the course of a year. Then they let the CVs sit for 18 to 30 months to allow any pending articles to mature into publications that they could verify.
To make the data set manageable, the researchers eventually analyzed 10 percent of the sample for accuracy. Of the 180 CVs reviewed, 141, or 78 percent, claimed to have at least one publication. But 79 of those 141 applicants (56 percent) had at least one publication on their CV that was unverifiable or inaccurate in a self-promoting way, such as misrepresenting authorship order.
Federal inquiry opened into Google health data deal The Hill
Next in Google’s Quest for Consumer Dominance: Banking WSJ. Clive comments:
As usual, you have to read half way through to find out
what’s really being proposed by Google, in terms of a product or service
offer. The answer to which is “nothing”.
“Our approach is going to be to partner deeply with banks and the
financial system,” Caesar Sengupta, Google’s general manager of payments
[said]”
Apart from a splitting an infinitive, what does “partner deeply” mean
from a product or service proposition? So Google offers, potentially, a
native-level (kernel level software stack) integration into Android.
Assuming the competition authorities — especially in the EU — don’t show
it a red card and insist on it being un-bundled. But even if it is
deemed permissible, every bank offers an app to access its own interface
to their back-end systems. The marginal increase in convenience that a
customer of an existing bank gets through not having to, oh, the
arduousness of it, download an app from Google Play is offset by handing
over whatever data Google sees fit to pilfer from you. Maybe people
were trusting enough not to smell something bad about this 10 years ago.
Not now.
Why the US economy isn’t as competitive or free as you think Martin Wolf, FT and Why is American internet access so much more expensive than the rest of the world? The Verge
Gougers ‘R’ Us: How Private Equity Is Gobbling Up Medical Care The American Conservative. “This article was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.”
Breaking: Private Equity company acquires .Org registry Domain Name Wire
Do You Know Who Owns Your Debt? GQ (UserFriendly).
Unrest at French universities after student sets himself alight over debts Guardian (Re Silc).
David Hughes’ Shale Reality Check 2019 Post Carbon Institute (TH).
Switching Power Grid to DC Could Boost its Capacity Machine Design (TW). Readers?
Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? Low Tech Magazine. Neat!
Federal inquiry opened into Google health data deal The Hill
Next in Google’s Quest for Consumer Dominance: Banking WSJ. Clive comments:
As usual, you have to read half way through to find out what’s really being proposed by Google, in terms of a product or service offer. The answer to which is “nothing”.Why the US economy isn’t as competitive or free as you think Martin Wolf, FT and Why is American internet access so much more expensive than the rest of the world? The Verge
“Our approach is going to be to partner deeply with banks and the financial system,” Caesar Sengupta, Google’s general manager of payments [said]”
Apart from a splitting an infinitive, what does “partner deeply” mean from a product or service proposition? So Google offers, potentially, a native-level (kernel level software stack) integration into Android. Assuming the competition authorities — especially in the EU — don’t show it a red card and insist on it being un-bundled. But even if it is deemed permissible, every bank offers an app to access its own interface to their back-end systems. The marginal increase in convenience that a customer of an existing bank gets through not having to, oh, the arduousness of it, download an app from Google Play is offset by handing over whatever data Google sees fit to pilfer from you. Maybe people were trusting enough not to smell something bad about this 10 years ago. Not now.
Gougers ‘R’ Us: How Private Equity Is Gobbling Up Medical Care The American Conservative. “This article was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.”
Breaking: Private Equity company acquires .Org registry Domain Name Wire
Do You Know Who Owns Your Debt? GQ (UserFriendly).
Unrest at French universities after student sets himself alight over debts Guardian (Re Silc).
David Hughes’ Shale Reality Check 2019 Post Carbon Institute (TH).
Switching Power Grid to DC Could Boost its Capacity Machine Design (TW). Readers?
Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence? Low Tech Magazine. Neat!
Feeling with hellish voracity
Because inside myself I saw what hell is like.— from The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.
Hell is the mouth that bites and eats the living flesh with its blood, and the one being eaten howls with delight in his eye: hell is pain as delight of the matter, and with the laughter of delight, the tears run in pain. And the tear that comes from the laughter of pain is the opposite of redemption. I was seeing the inexorability of the roach with its ritual mask. I was seeing that that was hell: the cruel acceptance of pain, the solemn lack of pity for one's own destiny, loving the ritual of life more than one's own self — that was hell, where the one eating the other's living face was indulging in the joy of pain.
For the first time I was feeling with hellish voracity the desire to have had the children I never had: I wanted to have reproduced, not in three or four children, but in twenty thousand my organic hellishness full of pleasure.
‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News NYT. Two words: “Judy Miller.” Everybody know who Judy Miller was?
His comment on Saez and Zucman is one of the best pieces of policy economics I have read in the last few years. Many of the main arguments have been debated on Twitter, or expressed by Larry Summers, so here I will stick with a few side points that have not received full attention.
First, if you hate monopoly rents, excess IP income, and the like, you should not be in love with a wealth tax, at least not in the steady state! A wealth tax hits the base and the safe rate of return as well. Ideally the anti-monopoly crowd should most of all favor higher taxes on net income. Not taxes on wealth.
Second, a wealth tax will encourage the shifting of much more production into non-profit institutions, or perhaps even into nationalizations of industry. Lots of hospitals would switch back to the not-for-profit form, not obviously a beneficial development in my view.
As a side note, many more non-profits would hire famous musical acts to play at their donor galas. The quality of champagne and cheese at those events will rise too. There would be much more pressure on non-profits to create private (non-taxed) benefits for their donors. I predict government regulation of non-profits would end up rising considerably as well, and not for the better.
Privatizing government assets such as land or spectrum would become more difficult — people would buy only at much lower prices. So the wealth tax is a recipe for greater statism in more ways than one.
Third, under a wealth tax Jeff Bezos would have lost de facto control over Amazon some time ago.
Those are my words rather than Kopfczuk’s, do read his entire paper.
I would add one final point. I think we are at the margin where advocacy of a wealth tax is more of a performative exercise — “we hadn’t poked rich people in the eye with this rhetorical needle yet, therefore I won’t really speak against it” — than any kind of substantive analytic debate.
