Lockdown the right move to minimise loss of life
Flattening the curve has to be our goal now and Premier Berejiklian's decision to shut all non-essential services in NSW is timely, brave and correct.
We fear phone tracking but it could be the help we need
The world's population is currently under routine surveillance in a manner that would have made George Orwell blanch. We could be using that to our favour.
IT WORKS, AND IT WORKS WELL: Why Zoom has become the darling of remote workers during the COVID-19 crisis.
Gibson Guitar Forces Its Factory Workers in Nashville to Work During COVID-19 Payday Report. Mike Elk
Trump: ‘I don’t know’ if my businesses will receive coronavirus assistance CNBC. Words fail me
Opinion: How Jackson Hole has become a tax haven
HMRC investigating tax evasion 'enablers'
Fifth Circuit Erroneously Describes Defraud Conspiracy as Conspiracy to Commit Tax Fraud
In United States v. Scully, ___ F.3d ___ (5th Cir. 3/4/20), here, the Fifth Circuit affirmed Scully’s convictin for “(1) conspiracy to defraud the United States, (2) conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and (3) three individual counts of wire fraud.” (Scully was acquitted of “preparing false tax returns,” § 7206(2).) The district court had sentence Scully to “concurrent, below-guidelines sentences of 180 months on the wire-fraud counts and 50 months on the tax-conspiracy count.” The CourtListener docket entries are here.
Heather M. Field (UC-Hastings), Tax Lawyers as Tax Insurance, 60 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 2111 (2019) (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado) here):
Transactional
tax lawyers, by rendering tax opinions, provide a version of insurance
to clients. This insurance is clearly incomplete, but by providing a tax
opinion, a lawyer conditionally agrees to indemnify the client for at
least part of the potential loss the client incurs if the favorable tax
treatment described in the opinion is successfully challenged. Although
insurance is not the primary function of transactional tax lawyers, and
although this Article does not argue that tax opinions should be
regulated as insurance, indemnification — a key element of insurance —
is an important part of the economic relationship between a client and a
lawyer who provides a tax opinion. Surprisingly, this insurance-like
function has been largely overlooked in the literature. Thus, by
identifying and exploring the insurance-like aspect of the transactional
tax lawyer’s role, this Article fills a gap in the literature and
offers a new framework for understanding the value of tax lawyers.
Wall Street Journal op-ed: The IRS Proves the Left’s Favorite Economists Wrong, by Phillip W. Magness (American Institute for Economic Research) & Stephen C. Miller (Troy University):
‘The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You” read a headline in the New York Times
last fall. This astounding claim, presented in the media as fact and
evidence of inequities baked into President Trump’s 2017 tax cut, came
from two economists at the University of California, Berkeley. Emmanuel
Saez and Gabriel Zucman asserted that 2018 was the first year in U.S.
history that the average tax rate on the 400 wealthiest income earners
dipped below the rates paid by the lower-middle class and poor.
Finally,
we had proof the rich weren’t paying their fair share. But new data
from the Internal Revenue Service suggest it isn’t true.