Monday, January 31, 2022

ATOmate’s integrated client communication



“Omertà — the brown code of silence” — says Steve Turner, searching for a way to describe what happens to organisations when cronyism takes hold. In the mid-2010s, Turner was working on patient safety projects as an independent consultant to an NHS trust, a healthcare provider in the UK’s public health system. The work was rewarding, but some things bothered him. Nurses confided to him that they had been bullied for highlighting risks and comments that clinical incidents were not investigated thoroughly. On one occasion a governance team member pressed him to downgrade an amber risk warning. He refused. After raising his concerns with various executives, he says the chair responded: “I don’t want to hear anything bad.” In 2014 he approached the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the sector regulator, which instructed the trust to undertake an external review. He says he has never been told what it concluded, either by the CQC or the trust, which stopped answering his emails. “There was a group of managers that stuck together rigidly around an unwritten rule that to progress they must protect the organisation’s reputation at all costs, regardless of patient safety,” he says.

How cronyism corrodes workplace relations and trust When a group is under threat, the instinct can be to close ranks rather than act in the best interest of the organisation


Companies allegedly forged documents to bring unapproved RATs into Australia, TGA says


NSW Police have launched a new operation to target organised crime networks across Sydney. Operation Hawk 2022 is a two-day high-visibility police operation which is aimed to disrupt the ongoing gangland war between the Alameddine and Hamze crime families and outlaw motorcycle gangs operating in the city. The operation began at 6am today with more than 600 officers deployed.



The Dallas County tax office has suspended face-to-face transactions because of sick employees and to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The move comes as the Commissioners Court is considering a new leave policy for employees who get sick and must isolate.


Germany's domestic intelligence service says the Chinese hacking group APT 27 has launched cyberattacks on businesses. The group has long been suspected of attacking Western government agencies.



ATOmate’s integrated client communication update feature is available now. To find out more about how the ATOmate platform is transforming how accountants manage the ATO documents and client communications, click here. 

  • ATO holds firm on push towards digital-only communication 
  • Tax agents can prepare now by stopping paper correspondence
  • ATOmate platform streamlines compliance processes, allows firms to update communication preferences in bulk & shift to digital communication
  • More digital transformation to come, now is the time for practitioners to prepare.


The man, who has been named as Joshua Matheson by the ATO, was sentenced at the Adelaide District Court following an investigation by the ATO. ATO investigation sparks warning to those cheating tax system


Death threats, ghost researchers and sock puppets: Inside the weird, wild world of dodgy academic research


Underworld figure and one-time ‘biggest illegal gaming operator’ in NSW dies


ECUADOR: An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering.


The benefits system that is Irish

by  Tyler Cowen

A dead man was brought to a post office this morning in an attempt to collect his pension in one of the most bizarre incidents that gardaí have ever seen.

The shocking incident in which the deceased male was propped up by two other men happened at the post office on Staplestown Road in Carlow town…

No money was handed over and it is understood that the deceased man is well known to the two men who moved his body.

A local woman living beside the post office told how her daughter witnessed two men carrying a man into the shop.

“She was leaving my house at the time and said the man looked unwell as his feet were dragging the ground,” she said.

The woman, who did not want to be named, said there was a queue outside of the post office at the time.

“It’s a small shop and you’re only allowed three at a time with social distancing. People were in shock as they thought he was after having a heart attack,” she said.

Here is the full story, note that the postal workers became “immediately suspicious.”

Here’s where nature is, in fact, healing. - Vox: “About 100 miles west of Chicago, Illinois, a tallgrass prairie teems with life. Here in this 3,800-acre piece of land, you can walk among brightly colored fields of wildflowers, hear the song of cerulean warblers and the hoot of short-eared owls, and, if you’re lucky, glimpse rare box turtles. It wasn’t always this way. Over the past two centuries, the Prairie State lost all but about 0.01 percent of its original prairie. This particular region, now known as the Nachusa Grasslands, was covered in part by neat rows of corn and soy, and that left little habitat for monarch butterflies, bison, or any of the thousands of plants and animals that depend on prairie ecosystems. That started to change in the 1980s, when a crew of volunteers and scientists began reviving the land — planting seeds, carrying out controlled burns, and reintroducing native species. The ecosystem bounced back, and today, the Nachusa Grasslands are home to 180 species of native birds, more than 700 species of plants, and a small herd of bison. In an age of extinction and climate change, you don’t often hear this kind of success story. Yet the Nachusa Grasslands of the world can help people find hope that the Earth isn’t doomed. 

Last summer, Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich, launched Restor, a mapping tool that shows where in the world people are doing this sort of restoring or conserving of ecosystems. Think of it as the “nature is healing” memefrom the early pandemic, but serious. We should be angry about climate change and the destruction of ecosystems, Crowther told Vox. “But without optimism, that outrage goes nowhere,” he said. 


Examples of people restoring land give us all something to root for, and now there’s a spot to find a whole bunch of them — tens of thousands, actually. Restor joins a trove of new environmental initiatives that focus on ecological “wins.” Last summer, for example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — which oversees the official “red list” of threatened species — came up with a new set of standards to measure the recovery of species, like the California condor. Perhaps it’s a sign that people want to look beyond what we have to lose, especially when there’s so much to gain…”

Dutch Government Will Buy A Rembrandt For €175 Million From An Offshore Tax Haven, Angering Public And Lawmakers

The Standard-Bearer (1636) is being purchased from the Rothschild family via a trust in the Cook Islands which is owned by a holding company in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — this while the government's official policy is (supposed to be) to crack down on tax avoidance. 



On the benefits of deliberate ignorance. "It's a way to maintain our beliefs about ourselves and others, it can be a mechanism for fairness or to remove bias, or a way to avoid overwhelm when bombarded with information."

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