For the first time since 1960, yellow lights will likely be getting longer, extending from 3.2 seconds to 4.5 seconds, thanks to new research on driving behavior and the persistence of an electrical engineer from Sweden. (“Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket”)
Central banks and fintech data issues (PDF) Bank of International Settlements. “Fintech creates important data gaps.”
Wall Street Journal, AI Comes to the Tax Code:
Governments are increasingly relying on machine learning and data analytics to analyze troves of data as they seek to detect tax evasion, respond to taxpayers’ questions and make themselves more efficient. ...
The Internal Revenue Service is designing machine-built graphs to plot the relationships among participants in business deals, giving auditors a new tool to analyze transactions and detect tax avoidance. The agency is using artificial intelligence to study notes that agency employees take when fielding questions from taxpayers and testing which combinations of formal notices and contacts are most likely to get a taxpayer who owes money to send a check.
For every dollar invested in the Internal Revenue Service, the agency collects an average $5 in revenue, making it “one of the best investments in the federal government,” according to the Treasury Department’s fiscal 2021 budget justification.
But the Treasury Department has also advised Congress that every dollar invested in enforcement “requires a funding increase in operations support for technology and administrative costs.”
Despite a decade of cuts to the IRS budget and workforce, members of the House Ways and Means Committee gave bipartisan support to President Donald Trump’s budget request to give the agency a $12 billion total budget for fiscal 2021.
When Getting Their Attention Isn’t Enough… When You Need Behavioral Change – From Bill Jensen’s decades long research on strategic change and communications he has derived clear actionable components for communicating behavioral change to employees.
- Pete Buttigieg suspended his presidential campaign Sunday evening. What does that mean? FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has thoughts. So does NBC’s Steve Kornacki and his big board.
- The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen with “Miranda’s Rebellion: The reckonings of one of the South’s white suburban women, whose loyalty is key to whether Trump is reelected.”
- One final thought: the very best thing on TV this weekend was David Byrne’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” If you missed it, watch this and this.
2 US grad students who were on the Diamond Princess cruise share harrowing details and photos from their quarantine and ‘zombie movie’ evacuation Business Insider (KW). The video may not work in your location.
This four-part podcast special series is well worth a listen. It’s called My Mother’s Murder, and centres around an investigation into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. It is narrated by one of her sons Paul Caruana Galizia. Here’s part of the description of the podcast series:
Daphne investigated corruption involving the most powerful businessmen and politicians in Malta where she lived. She paid with her life. Her son Paul goes in search of the men who ordered her murder.“
At the Tax Justice Network we have the highest respect for the courage of the incredible Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose work we followed closely, and also the bravery of her family who have continued the fight for justice in Malta.
Their perseverance, with massive support from the Daphne Project, has yielded impressive results, with regular visits and pressure from MEPs and eventually an inquiry by the European Banking Authority into the notorious Pilatus Bank, which you can read more about here and here. Members of the European Parliament expressed their concern that
in the absence of proper regulation Pilatus Bank has been free to pursue investigative journalists and whistleblowers with the full force of the law.”
This podcast is important particularly in the way it dissects how the corrupt can dismantle the State and capture it for their own ends, sliding so quickly into intimidation and violent repression of all who stand in their way.
Daphne’s work went way beyond Malta, to the very nature of corruption, its facilitators in the world’s most powerful countries, and of the finance curse, which we’ve written and warned so much about – Malta is an example of the worst that can happen when a nation has an overgrown finance sector which has total state protection. We’ve seen so much intimidation and fear of speaking out, particularly in small island nations suffering from the finance curse.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse – “The latest available case-by-case records from the Department of Justice show that the prosecution of white-collar offenders in January 2020 reached an all-time low since tracking began during the Reagan Administration. Only 359 defendants were prosecuted. Almost all of these were individuals rather than businesses. January 2020’s prosecutions continued a downward slide, dropping 8 percent from a year ago, and were down 25 percent from just five years ago. On an annual basis, during the Obama Administration they reached over 10,000 in FY 2011. If prosecutions continue at the same pace for the remainder of FY 2020, they are projected to fall to 5,175 – about half the level of their Obama-era peak. These comparisons are based on case-by-case information obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University after successful litigation against the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act.
Prosecutors chiefly pursue individuals when prosecuting white-collar crimes. Corporations and other business organizations are rarely prosecuted. Yet white-collar crimes typically involve some form of fraud or anti-trust violations involving financial, insurance or mortgage institutions; health care providers; securities and commodities firms; or frauds committed in tax, federal procurement or federal programs among others. Since separate tracking for business entities began in FY 2004, businesses made up just 1 out of every 100 prosecutions. Mirroring overall trends, the number of white-collar offenses that business entities have been prosecuted for have also been generally falling…”
Malta is ranked number 18 in our most recent Financial Secrecy Index, with a secrecy score (62) which places it among the worst offenders in Europe . You can read our assessment here
Here’s a trailer from Tortoise Media on the 4 part podcast series below. The podcast is available on various podcast platforms. Do have a listen.
Nothing to see here': Home Affairs chief denies knowing of bribe requests
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Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo was defiantly telling a parliamentary
committee that his department had no bribery concerns when an email
arrived to contradict him.