Opinion | When Reputation Matters, Leaks Like the Pandora Papers Can Be Very Effective
Where are the US billionaires, the Wall Streeters, the Big Four tax firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC? Michael West explores the mystery of the Pandora Papers in this first of a two-part series.
In the wake of the stunning Pandora Papers data leak this week, the ABC enthused, “Even by the ICIJ’s standards, this is big. If the documents were printed out and stacked up they would be four times taller than Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower”.
Probably not. If we assume Pandora is like its predecessors Panama Papers and Paradise Papers – where less than 1% of the data was made public – that would represent a stack of documents 12.2 metres high, not 1220 metres, which would get you up to Yogurt World on Level 5 of the Centrepoint food court.
Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up?
US response to Pandora Papers leaves Australia exposed
A bipartisan bill tabled in the US Congress after the release of the Pandora Papers threatens to isolate Australia as one of the last holdouts refusing to implement anti-money laundering rules that cover lawyers, accountants and real estate agents.
Monday’s publication of the Pandora Papers, a massive leak of offshore secrets which exposes the undisclosed holdings of more than 330 politicians and 35 current and former heads of state, has sparked calls around the world for reforms to financial reporting and secrecy law
On Wednesday, Democrat Tom Malinowski and Republican John Curtis announced in Washington they would introduce a bill,dubbed the “enablers act”, into the House of Representatives.
“Disclosures within the Pandora Papers are the clearest demonstration yet of the historic threat posed by foreign corruption,” they said. “Billions of dollars of dirty money belonging to adversarial actors are flooding the United States.”
Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill, who in June sponsored a Senate inquiry into Australia’s money laundering laws by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, said: “We simply can’t allow the situation to continue as it is. It’s a profoundly unethical stance.”
What’s the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion?
The difference used to matter. Evasion was illegal. It meant not paying tax that was due. Avoidance meant arranging your affairs so tax wasn’t due.
Australian media mogul Kerry Packer used the distinction as a complete defence when he told a parliamentary committeein 1991 he was
not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Of course, I am minimising my tax. Anybody in this country who does not minimise his tax wants his head read.
Emmanuel Akoto, also known as “Kofi,” of Grand Prairie, Texas was convicted following a jury trial in October 2019. According to court documents and evidence at trial, from 2011 through 2014, Akoto purchased from third parties more than 560 stolen identities and used some of those identities to file false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). These returns listed fake income and tax withholdings and sought fraudulent refunds, which Akoto and his co-conspirators loaded onto pre-paid debit cards. At one point, Akoto tried to purchase via email identities from a United States Secret Service undercover agent. The wide-ranging conspiracy involved others in Texas, California, Georgia, and Ghana.
Texas man gets 70 months prison for stolen identity refund fraud; bought ID’s on the dark web
Blue J Predicted With 95% Confidence That 7th Circuit Would Affirm Tax Court In Innocent Spouse Cases
Steven Davis and Magnus Henrekson
"Let us return to the recent studies by Prescott (2002, 2003), which consider the output, employment and welfare consequences of personal taxes in an equilibrium model with one production sector and a simple labor-leisure choice for the representative household. Our evidence supports the view that tax rate differences among rich countries are a major reason for large international differences in market work time. At the same time, however, our evidence strongly suggests that labor and consumption taxes operate with powerful effect on several margins: substitution between legal and underground activity, substitution between home and market production, the mix of market production activity, and the composition of market expenditures."
Yes taxes really do matter (Mankiw)
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- Bribery and corruption: Tory donor’s oil firm Petrofac admits employees paid bribes to get contracts (25 Sep 2021)
- Commentray on the Compensation (London Capital & Finance plc and Fraud Compensation Fund) Bill (24 Sep 2021)
- Bribery and Corruption: SEC Charges World's Largest Advertising Group WPP with FCPA Violations (24 Sep 2021)
- National insurance hike to hit NHS and care staff with £900m tax bill (23 Sep 2021)
- Real carbon taxes are the next big political battle (23 Sep 2021)
- Rise of the billionaires: Why it’s time for the super-rich to pay their fair share of tax (23 Sep 2021)
- Two more energy suppliers go bust as Kwarteng considers windfall tax (22 Sep 2021)
- It’s time for a new tax on the UK’s wealthiest 1% – arguments against it don’t add up (21 Sep 2021)
- Labour pledges crackdown on private equity (21 Sep 2021)
- Pandemic Profits Who’s cashing in during covid? (20 Sep 2021)
- Fresh calls for windfall tax on companies that prospered during Covid (20 Sep 2021)
- How Accounting Giants Craft Favorable Tax Rules From Inside Government (19 Sep 2021)
- HMRC investigates 153 'enablers' of tax evasion (17 Sep 2021)
- Pulling down the ladder: The case for a proportional property tax (17 Sep 2021)
- Tax lost in UK amounts to £35bn – almost half, say campaigners, due to fraud (16 Sep 2021)
- Measuring tax gaps 2021 edition - tax gap estimates for 2019 to 2020 (16 Sep 2021)
Responding to questions by the Senate Select Committee on Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) said it believes there is a great deal of misreporting about crypto trading in the country, driven largely by lack of understanding rather than deliberate non-compliance.
Australian Tax Office warns: taxpayers on the hook for crypto tax earnings
In this case, the applicant for the change of name, Mr Paul MacMahon (“Mr MacMahon”) had sought to change his name to “Paul Rawling Mann” and as part of his application he had disclosed two prior criminal convictions.
3 The Registrar, as is her usual practice in such a situation, arranged a National Police Check. The National Police Certificate which issued as a result showed that in fact Mr MacMahon had committed more than 100 offences, had pleaded guilty in 2008 District Court proceedings to 35 counts of what the Court of Criminal Appeal (in MacMahon v R [2011] NSWCCA 147) categorised as “identity fraud offences”, 39 counts of what the Court categorised as “ tax fraud offences” and 35 summary offences relating to making false statements to the Australian Electoral Commission. The Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the sentence of imprisonment imposed by the District Court, being a head sentence of 6 years with a single non-parole period of 4 years
Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages v MacMahon [2021] NSWCATAP 303 (5 October 2021)
Employee Engagement as a Strategy for Community Engagement
- Monopoly power and political corruption: Starve the (corporate) beast, shrink it until it fits in a bathtub.
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Bridging the gap? An analysis of genderpay gap reporting in six countries - ZDNet – “Australia has scored equal last with the UK in a new global gender pay gap study published by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Collect London. The report, Bridging the gap [PDF], ranked gender pay gap reporting systems across 11 indicators in Australia, France, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Those indicators included transparency levels around gender pay gap, mandated action plans, enforcement and penalties, whether there is sufficient government guidance and support, and is there accountability enforced through such reports and assessments. Based on that ranking system, both Australia and the UK scored four out of 11. Spain was the top-ranked nation, scoring eight-and-a-half out of 11, followed by France with a score of eight, South Africa with five-and-a-half, and then Sweden with a score of five. “All data are publicly available (except, crucially, organisation-level gender pay gaps) and can be found on the interactive Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) DataExplorer … despite this, the gender pay gap has changed little in 40 years,” the study said of Australia’s ranking. “Based on the insights of stakeholders interviewed for this research, the key strengths of the Australian regime are its comprehensiveness and transparency; the key weaknesses are the lack of mandated positive action and non-disclosure of organisation-level gender pay gaps.” The report also noted that while many Australian organisations have gender equality policies in place, evidence suggests that many policies are ineffective….”