Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Two NSW Government ministers have been accused of ignoring expert recommendations and pork-barrelling $44 million in arts funding into Coalition electorates.
Key points:
There was almost $50 million in money to spend, but only $4,000 went to projects in Labor electorates
At least eight projects "not recommended for funding" were given money
One Labor MP described the way the cash was spent as "farcical"
Ahead of last year's state election, Deputy Premier John Barilaro and then-arts minister Don Harwin toured regional NSW, handing out infrastructure grants worth $47 million to arts and cultural organisations.
A team of experts had in 2018 been appointed to assess more than 150 applications for the Regional Cultural Fund grants and ranked the 116 successful projects in the order they should be funded.
Documents obtained by the ABC under freedom of information laws reveal their advice was largely ignored and instead all but $3 million was spent on projects in Coalition seats.
Can bosses force employees to work longer hours in order to receive JobKeeper payments? Are employees entitled to refuse extra duties under the scheme? The ABC has spoken to the experts to find out.
Businesses with thousands of employees may have been receiving unqualified advice around the government’s stimulus measures from unregistered advisers, the Tax Practitioners Board has revealed.
Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand tax leader Michael Croker welcomed the TPB’s crackdown, while championing the roles that tax and BAS agents are continuing to play in delivering the government’s stimulus measures. "The downsides of making false or incorrect statements to the ATO are substantial. The ATO integrity unit is out and about now investigating questionable claims for COVID-19 benefits.”
Michael Ibrahim was sentenced to a maximum 30 years' jail on Tuesday, the latest in a line of criminal heads to roll, after an investigation spanning three continents.
As a wave of coronavirus infections hit Italy in late March, Rocco Molè, a member of the country’s ’Ndrangheta organized crime group, was faced with a dilemma.
He was holding on to 537 kilograms of cocaine, freshly smuggled into the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro, which his clan controls. But due to lockdowns brought in to control the virus, he could only move small amounts of the drug at a time northwards to Europe’s cocaine users.
So he decided to bury the stash in a lemon grove.
The incident recounted in a statement by Italian police shows the predicament facing cocaine smugglers, as the global pandemic has increased scrutiny on them and disrupted their smuggling and distribution networks.
Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report– “Here we are at another edition of the DBIR. This is an exciting time for us as our little bundle of data turns 13 this year. That means that the report is going through a lot of big changes right now, just as we all did at that age OHow working from home is changing our economy forever - xford University Press Blog: “The virus lurks on car door handles, on doorknobs and the floor, on the breath of others or in a friend’s hug, on onions in the supermarket, and on the hands of the valet who parks your car. If you venture outside, everything and everyone is a threat. So, it is better to stay home, safely locked away with your previously disinfected computer which connects you to a world that is innocuous because it’s virtual and therefore harmless. What makes you sick lurks outside your door. The fear of what we know to be real, but which only materializes in suspicion, is enough to keep us locked away. This individual sensation of anguish in the face of a threat leads to voluntary confinement and that is the success of social control. Fear is used as a disciplinary device. The strategies used to make bodies docile for the purpose of social control is what the philosopher and historian Michel Foucaultcalled discipline. In the context of COVID-19, there are those who do not initially choose self-discipline since there is an even higher level of discipline: mass deaths in foreign climes. But those who have yet to discipline themselves will do so once these deaths increase or occur closer to home. China and Korea didn’t wait for the second stage and went directly to surveillance through apps. In the end we have the shocking images of deserted New York and Venicewhich show that discipline has been successful: Nobody goes out anymore. We initially resist discipline – as Foucault pointed out in the case of schools and the army – but in the end we confine ourselves to the home as an institution of isolation for biopolitical purposes…”
Readers of this blog might be interested in the following article by a prominent tax crimes practitioner: Scott Michel, INSIGHT: The IRS’s Renewed Focus on Fraud—Implications for Tax Practitioners (Bloomberg Tax 5/8/20), here.
Here’s a teaser from the opening:
The IRS’s fraud enforcement pendulum may be swinging back toward more enforcement after a decade of administrative difficulties for the agency. Scott Michel of Caplin & Drysdale identifies indicia of increased fraud enforcement and discusses the implications for tax practitioners. Tax practitioners often analogize tax enforcement to a pendulum, slowly swinging back and forth between greater and lesser IRS civil examination and criminal investigation activity. For example, in the mid-2000s, the IRS was recovering from the congressional bashing of the late 1990s, which lowered audit, enforcement, and collection activity, and it then embarked on a major enforcement push against marketed and structured tax shelter transactions. The IRS and the Department of Justice moved aggressively on multiple tracks at once, pursuing criminal indictments, civil promoter penalty examinations, and other initiatives. In 2007 two top private practitioners reacted to these developments in an article entitled “IRS Enforcement: The Pendulum Has Swung Too Far,” warning that these action could become an “institutionalized way of doing business,” possibly leading to “a state of permanent war” between the IRS and tax professionals. (K. Keneally and C. Rettig,Journal of Tax Practice and Procedure, Apr./May 2007. Ms. Keneally and Mr. Rettig later took hold of the pendulum themselves, the former as Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ Tax Division from 2012-2014, and the latter as current IRS Commissioner.) Ultimately, however, events overtook their concern. Over the past decade the IRS has faced substantial budget shortfalls, political headwinds, and massive workforce attrition, with the result that except in selected areas, such as unreported foreign accounts and assets, enforcement has waned, and audits, fraud referrals, and criminal investigations have reached historic lows. Before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the IRS took a number of steps to swing the pendulum back toward more fraud enforcement. Once the IRS and the rest of us are beyond the extraordinary adjustments underway now to our tax administration system and our lives, these actions will begin to take hold. This article will consider these increasingly clear signals from the IRS that when that happens, investigating and punishing fraud will again be a growing focus for the IRS, with important implications for tax practitioners advising clients in audit and collection matters.
McDonalds is unpatriotic. In Denmark, they pay their unionized workers twice as much as U.S. workers with long paid vacations and benefits, because they have to. In our country they strip-mine their unorganized workers, because they can. In both countries, McD's makes profits.-R
