Voters Rarely Switch Parties, but Recent Shifts Further Educational, Racial Divergence

 

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

— Louise Bogan, born on in 1897

Jack Townsend - DOJ Tax has this press release:  Houston Attorney Sentenced to Prison for Offshore Tax Evasion Scheme: Conspired to Secretly Bring to the US More Than $18 Million in Untaxed Money Held in Foreign Banks, Houston Attorney Sentenced to 24 Months for Conspiracy and Tax Evasion . 

 

 

Former Perth City councillor Lily Chen ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in the seat of Mirrabooka in the 2017 state election. While doorknocking she handed out promotional bottles of wine.

City of Perth's day of reckoning arrives with long-awaited report to be tabled in WA Parliament

 

2020 Federal Tax Procedure Book Available on SSRN 

Jack Townsend - “I have posted to SSRN my 2020 editions (Student and Practitioner) of my Federal Tax Procedure Book.  Since there is considerable overlap between Tax Crimes and Tax Procedure, I will offer the links to the SSRN pages for the two editions where they can be downloaded.

• Federal Tax Procedure (2020 Student Ed.), here.
• Federal Tax Procedure (2020 Practitioner Ed.), here.

Information about these editions is presented on the Federal Tax Procedure page titled "2020 Federal Tax Procedure Book," here

The UK’s Russia Report on the “Londongrad Laundromat” (Counter Punch July 29 2020)

By KENNETH SURIN | On 9 August 2020

The UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), drawn from MPs and peers of all parties, last week published its report on possible Russian interference in UK politics.

Continue reading →

COVID-19: Early release of superannuation stirs debate as fraudsters strike

The superannuation scheme, announced in March as the first wave of COVID-19 plummeted cities across the country into lockdowns, is alleged to have been targeted by fraudsters who plundered the retirement savings of unsuspected victims.

“Government ministers are … yet to reveal how many fraudulent claims have been made, or what the government is doing to compensate victims after the ATO directed their super fund to make a payment to a fraudulent account,” Mr Jones said.

Know your blind spots in tax fraud prevention | SAS

Where traditional tax fraud prevention and detection falls short, and what tax agencies should be doing about it.

TPB ramps up terminations with 129% spike

The TPB will soon detail its compliance focus for the 2020–21 year in its corporate plan, which is scheduled to be released on 19 August.

TPB secretary and chief executive Michael O’Neill will present the plan and explain the board’s focus areas for the year ahead in a webinar on 25 August

Jeffrey Knapp on John Lennon and the Big 4: give public interest a chance

 

KPMG and the other Big Four audit firms are at a crossroads, writes Jeff Knapp. Their work with multinational clients to skirt ethical accounting rules and regulations has been on show time and time again. They need to decide what they really are; a salesforce, or – what they profess to be – an accounting profession.

A retired accounting lecturer, I have analysed hundreds of audits by the Big 4 of large multinational proprietary companies in Australia over the past decade. In that time, the Big Four have allowed their multinational clients to declassify from “reporting entity” status and dispense with General Purpose financial reports.

 

The Unspotted Issue in an Audit; Ethics and Crimes

In an ABA Tax Section Court Procedure Virtual meeting on Wednesday, there was a one-hour discussion of ethical issues in handling a matter in the Tax Court.  

Voters Rarely Switch Parties, but Recent Shifts Further Educational, Racial Divergence “Neither party nets an overall advantage from the 9% of voters who have switched since 2018: Overwhelming majorities of both Republican and Democratic voters have retained their party affiliation over the past two years, a tumultuous period marked by a global pandemic, mass protests against racial injustice and a presidential impeachment. Since 2018, comparably small shares of registered voters in both parties have changed parties. About one-in-ten voters (9%) who affiliated with the Republican Party or leaned Republican in September 2018 now identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. An identical share of voters (9%) who two years ago identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic now align with the GOP. A new study, conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, is based on interviews with the same set of 11,077 registered voters on five occasions over the past two years, from September 2018 to July 2020…”

The federal government is hiding under the covers

By MUNGO MACCALLUM | On 11 August 2020

Having tried pleas, threats, restrictions, lockdowns, fines and closures in vain, our political masters are now apparently cutting to the melodramatic climax: scare the living crap out of us writes Mungo MacCallum.

Continue reading →

Trump escalates anti-China campaign with Hong Kong sanctions Financial Times

Trump Blew Up More Than Just TikTok and WeChat Bloomberg

Banning TikTok: Are We Reproducing the Chinese Internet in America? Matt Stoller 

Trump advisers urge delisting of U.S.-listed Chinese firms that fail to meet audit standardsReuters 

New York Times op-ed:  ‘Racism Makes a Liar of God’: How the American Catholic Church Is Wrestling With the Black Lives Matter Movement, by Elizabeth Bruenig

In 1963, when 250,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, they did so under the prayerful invocation of Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington. He called for the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of Christians to the injustice of racial discrimination, condemned violence and praised the activists who had possessed the courage to go forth, like Moses, in search of a beautiful country.

Five decades later, these hopes seem in many respects unfulfilled. About one in five Americans identify as Catholic, and as of 2018, roughly six in 10 white Catholics felt that police killings of Black men were isolated incidents rather than evidence of a profound and lethal bias. Prominent Catholic commentators, including Bill O’Reilly and Father Dwight Longenecker, fear and reject the Black Lives Matter movement.

How safe is it to fly? (Bloomberg)

What is the share of the population with preexisting immunity?  Recommended

 And excellent David Wallace-Wells piece on the spread of herd immunity ideas and T-cell immunity (as more significant than had been thought) throughout the scientific community.  Also recommended

Obesity and corruption

Male earnings in the U.S. do not show a general volatility increase over the last 30 years