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Friday, September 24, 2021

HMRC tax gaps: Fear versus Love

 A tear contains an ocean. A photographer is aware of the tiny moments in a persons life that reveal greater truths.”


As Richard Nixon once said, “people react to fear, not love”. It’s a fitting aphorism for the latest alert from the Australian Tax Office (TA 2021/2): Disguising undeclared foreign income as gifts or loans from related overseas entities, which continues the ATO’s long-running war on undisclosed offshore income.

ATO targets ‘gifts’ from overseas


Digital transformation – Australia as a world leader Jeremy Hirschhorn, Second Commissioner, Client Engagement Paper delivered to the 2021 Pearcey Oration and Victorian Entrepreneur Award 1 September 2021



It’s time for civil society to engage with the OECD to deliver the global tax deal developing countries need


It is time to tax the rich

The Guardian featured an article yesterday that was promoted with this tweet: It seems like AOC did a good job with that dress, but I
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HMRC tax gaps

HMRC are issuing their tax gap data this morning. Unfortunately I will be committed for much of the day: comment will have to wait. But, if
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HMRC’s tax gap measure suggests that its claims to be making the tax system easier to use are not justified

As I noted earlier today HMRC published their tax gap data for 2020 this morning. I have been distracted all day by other demands, but
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The World Bank has confessed its failings. It doesn’t need to be scrapped for doing so


Appeals Arguments Over Whether Government Brought Evasion and Tax Conspiracy Charges Within Statute of Limitations With No Mention of WSLA


NY Times: Why Taxing Stock Buybacks Is The Wrong Fix For Excessive Executive Pay


A lifetime of mortgage debt

Between 1990 and 2015 the percentage of 55-64 year olds who owned their home outright fell from 70 per cent to 47 per cent, according to research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. During the same period, the percentage of those carrying a mortgage debt rose from 12 per cent to 31 per cent.  The balance were renters.

A 2018 Grattan Institute report came up with a similar trajectory: in 1995 72 per cent of Australians aged 55-64, the years prior to retirement, owned their home outright. In 2015-16 – the most recent figures available – this figure had fallen to 42 per cent.

More Australians are retiring with a big mortgage. Should they use superannuation to pay it off?



. “Moreover, we find a marked decay in background parental relatedness co-occurring with or shortly after the advent of sedentary agriculture.”


Dwarkesh on Emergent Ventures and searching for talent.


The first mention of America in European chronicles?


NBER – Harms of AI, Daron Acemoglu,Working Paper 29247 DOI 10.3386/w29247 Issue Date “This essay discusses several potential economic, political and social costs of the current path of AI technologies. I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity; and damaging political discourse, democracy’s most fundamental lifeblood. Although there is no conclusive evidence suggesting that these costs are imminent or substantial, it may be useful to understand them before they are fully realized and become harder or even impossible to reverse, precisely because of AI’s promising and wide-reaching potential. I also suggest that these costs are not inherent to the nature of AI technologies, but are related to how they are being used and developed at the moment – to empower corporations and governments against workers and citizens. As a result, efforts to limit and reverse these costs may need to rely on regulation and policies to redirect AI research. Attempts to contain them just by promoting competition may be insufficient


The external wealth of nations database


Brookings – Editor’s Note: “For the past several years, Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, now a senior fellow in the Hutchins Center at Brookings, and Philip Lane, now chief economist of the European Central Bank, have been curating a database on external financial assets and liabilities for more than 200 countries that stretches back to 1970—the External Wealth of Nations. The Hutchins Center is now making the entire dataset[Excel download] widely available online and will update it regularly. The EWN provides estimates of each country’s external financial assets and liabilities. These data also yield estimates of each country’s net international investment position (NIIP), the difference between its total external financial assets and its total external liabilities…“




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