"I am not old but mellow, like good wine."
- Stephen Phillips
Dr Cope agrees with Yarra Bay club about enjoying simple pleasures and balancing out to savour good wines, sea food and company. Slowing down …
"Wine is at the head of all medicines; where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary."
- Babylonian Talmud: Baba Bathra
The World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2022 Fast Company: “Innovating on behalf of customers never goes out of fashion. Our definitive annual showcase of the best in business features inspiring stories across a wide range of industries, from advertising to wellness, and every corner of the globe.
The companies we honor below are pressuring the carbon economy by creating a market for removing CO2 from the atmosphere (Stripe), developing chemicals without the traditional reliance on fossil fuels (Solugen, Twelve), electrifying lower-income housing (BlocPower), and using data to help countries (Climate Trace), companies (Watershed), and individuals (Doconomy) minimize their carbon footprints.
They’re adapting to our world of hybrid workplaces by building tools with the stresses of remote work in mind (Microsoft), creating virtual whiteboards that turn every meeting into an opportunity for collaboration (Miro), and developing design software that lets every employee be an effective visual communicator (Canva).
Other businesses are knitting new, closer relationships between fans and the things they love, whether that’s the global K-pop sensation BTS or Justin Bieber (Hybe); athletes from the NBA, UFC, or La Liga (Dapper Labs); or simply a burrito bowl (Chipotle).
These stories, found on our list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, plus the hundreds of other ones honored across our sector lists, are brimming with insights into how organizations can make a meaningful impact—on their own organizations, their industries, and society at large.
John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power, from 1862. Cairnes remains greatly underrated as an economist. But The Slave Power is most remarkable for seeing that slavery was a system that pervaded (and corrupted) all aspects of the economy and society of the South. An excellent early integration of economic reasoning and sociology. And to think he wrote this from Galway, not Mississippi.
Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: A Biography. A revelatory book that proves Stettheimer’s reputation deserves to be upgraded to the top tier of American artists of her time. The color plates are wonderful. I hadn’t known of her inspiration coming from Ballet Russe works. For those who care, definitely recommended, deserves to make the best of the year list.
Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible. One of the better Lems, reminds me of a Star Trek episode, with shades of gray goo hypotheses and an East Bloc ending.
I liked Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.
John Davis, Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher is mostly a social history.
There is also Penelope J. Corfield, The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain.
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy elicited this blurb from me: “How does the concept of intangible capital help explain some features of what has gone wrong in our world? How is the concept of intangible capital key to fixing what has gone wrong and improving our world? This is the go-to book for those and other critical questions for boosting economic growth.”
ATO leakers exempt from Boucher inquiry - Crikey
PERESTROIKA IN THE TAX OFFICE - AFR
Trevor Boucher ATAX - Paying Tax
THE STEEP PATH TO TAX OFFICE REFORM
It's one thing to produce a report on changing the tax office, but quite another to put the recommendations into practice
In proposing 148 measures to reform the Australian Taxation Office, Federal Parliament's joint public accounts committee heralds radical changes to tax gathering. But will the inquiry's most enduring legacy be committee member Senator Bronwyn Bishop's verbal assaults on the former tax commissioner, Trevor Boucher, rather than tangible results?
The report's recommendations have been acclaimed by tax lobby groups, including the Australian Society of CPAs, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Tax Institute of Australia and the Corporate Tax Association. The recommendations cover every aspect of the tax office that has been criticised, but the scope of the report seems so wide that the Government and the tax office bureaucracy might find the changes indigestible. Many of the reforms could be expensive to implement and costly to tax revenue.
So far, the Treasury is uncommitted, and its response has been vague. Assistant Treasurer George Gear told Parliament last week: "The Government will always give the tax office all the resources it needs in terms of manpower, equipment and decent policies. In that regard, I welcome the report." The Government is expected to introduce a tax-simplification project, but one far short of the committee's proposals for complete simplification within five years.
Les Scott, the committee's chairman, says the Government is positive about the report, but all the proposals are unlikely to be adopted. Most of the recommendations are policy matters requiring a Treasury response. Others, such as some aspects of proposed reforms to the ruling process, are matters for the tax office. The tax commissioner, Michael Carmody, welcomes the proposals as a progression along the modernisation path the tax office is already taking.
The recommendations deal with the structure of the tax office, the rulings process, the role of tax auditors, the need for simpler tax laws, the role of tax self-assessment and the question of culpability penalties. It recommends that the tax office should be structured as the independent Australian Taxation Commission, a move that would give the body a more corporate feel, make its accountability to Parliament more "transparent" and allow it to hire external tax audits outside normal Public Service salary guidelines.
The report says the administrative structure of the tax office has changed little in its 80-year history. "The committee considers the tax office still has a long way to go in providing sufficiently high-quality service to both taxpayers and their agents to enable them to satisfy their obligations."
On the rulings issue, it says a fundamental review is needed because the process has become biased in favor of the tax office. The costs involved when a taxpayer challenges a tax office interpretation in court have effectively given the tax office more power. "The committee affirms its belief that only Parliament has the power to make law," the report says. "In no circumstances should an administrator have the capacity to impose upon citizens obligations which cannot be supported clearly in law."
The report says the tax commissioner must be more accountable for rulings and that the status of his rulings need clarification. It criticises the tax office practice of imposing penalties on taxpayers who do not follow tax office rulings. Tax office staff are drawing their own inferences, rather than referring the matter to court, the report says.
The report lists 34 recommendations on the role of auditors, the collective effect of which is to curtail the powers of individual tax officers. For instance, a unit independent of the audit group would be created to make the final decision on amended assessments. The auditors' role would be narrowed to investigating the taxpayer and preparing a report, with the decisions on penalties made by a management group set up by the tax office. Auditors'technical knowledge and commercial understanding would be improved.
The report calls for increased support to taxpayers to assist them in satisfying their "obligation" to the tax office under self-assessment. "The importance of taxpayer compliance with, and understanding of, the obligations imposed by the act has been starkly exposed by the introduction of the self-assessment system," the report says. Taxation assessments should be fully supportable and justified in writing, which will need a formal system of internal review.
The report also:
* Expresses concern about the technical planning and priorities of the tax office's 10-year, $1-billion modernisation program. It considers lack of resources to be an impediment to modernisation.
* Recommends creating a specialist tax function in the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
* Recommends a series of low-cost complaints tribunals for tax disputes involving less than $5000. This would involve a non-refundable fee of $50.
* Promotes the much-vaunted idea of a charter of rights for taxpayers, outlining what they should expect from the tax office, as well as their rights and obligations.
Peter Dowling, an Ernst & Young tax partner in Brisbane who was also the committee's technical adviser, is confident that many of the measures will be introduced because they are cheap to implement. Dowling says that because the report is a bipartisan effort produced by a joint committee, the proposals will be treated with more respect than usual. "I will be surprised if the Government does not take up a number of the recommendations, or at least has good reasons for not taking them up."
Dowling says the measures are sound, but he fears that the recommendations for the auditors' role could involve too many administrative troubles. At the moment a tax auditor is investigator, judge, jury and sentencer. "It is too much for one person to maintain balance between these functions."
Dowling says auditors will feel that their role is being eroded. "It will be a real come-down for them. But hopefully they will recognise there will still be a role for a professional auditor, whose job is to understand business, how it operates and report on the facts in a timely and accurate manner."
Keith James, a prominent Melbourne tax practitioner, is containing his enthusiasm. He says there have been a number of reports on the tax office over the years, with few real reforms resulting. "The organisation tends to just grind on, and opportunities for major reform do not get taken up," he says.
On the tax simplification issue, James says the debate has been simplistic. Any meaningful reforms in this area must be at policy -- in other words Treasury -- level. "Most of the complexity comes from policy. A recent example is the case of the National Australia Bank and fringe benefits tax, in which the commissioner said he had no option but to hold that taxi fares for shift workers were a fringe benefit." James says the simplification measures are naive because they do not take revenue implications into account.
Dowling agrees that simplifying the tax act is easy to talk about, but hard to achieve. Rather than rewriting the act, he suggests a procedure in which any new tax laws must comply with "simplicity benchmarks". He says: "Concentrating on changing the fundamental sections of the tax act would be missing the point. It actually may not be cost-effective to change sections of the act." The reformers should focus on "silly, nit-picking laws" that affect many taxpayers. Anomalies, such as the existence of at least four definitions of an employee in the tax act, should be tackled.
