IRS Sting & IRS Hiring Tax AGents: Research finds people lie just a little bit day-to-day — except for a few prolific liars

The Sting That Snagged the Tax Lawyer to a Pair of Billionaires

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• IRS says enablers help Americans hide untaxed billions abroad
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Houston tax lawyer Carlos Kepke had been tutoring rich Americans like Robert F. Smith for decades on how to move assets offshore when an undercover agent posing as a bar owner turned up in 2018.

The goal was to gather evidence for a tax fraud case against Kepke. It wasn’t hard. As the wired agent recorded the conversation, Kepke bragged about placing assets in offshore trusts, notably in the Central American nation of Belize. Clients move money and claim to yield control, in keeping with federal law. But they decide how it’s used, not the foreign trustees.

IRS Hiring Hundreds of Revenue Agents to Conduct Taxpayer Audits

BY NAOMI JAGODA

July 13, 2022, 6:07 AM

The IRS announced Tuesday that it is hiring 470 revenue agents to focus on auditing individual and business tax returns.

The revenue agents will work in the IRS’s Small Business/Self Employed Division and will be tasked with examining returns and identifying potential tax fraud and abusive transactions. They will audit a number of types of taxpayers, including sole proprietorships, small corporations, partnerships, and fiduciaries, the agency said.

• The hiring push comes after the IRS saw a reduction in the size of its workforce over the past decade, notably in enforcement, as a result of budget cuts. 

Research finds people lie just a little bit day-to-day — except for a few prolific liars You know poker players lie, but how about family, friends or acquaintances? Are they lying? A new study co-authored by a UW-La Crosse faculty member may provide some reassurance. 

Most communication is honest and most lies are told by a few prolific liars, says UWL Professor Tony Docan-Morgan, who recently co-authored the publication,  “Unpacking variation in lie prevalence: Prolific liars, bad lie days, or both?” in Communication Monographs, the flagship journal of the National Communication Association. The study examined 116,366 lies told by 632 participants over 91 consecutive days. Participants self-reported their lies daily using an online survey. 

About 75 % of respondents did not lie much — about zero to two lies per day. And most lies were inconsequential, little white lies like saying you like a gift you really don’t. A small group — 6 % of respondents — had similarly low levels of lying on average, but had days in which they lied much more frequently.   Unlike most previous lie studies, this new research examined lies over time instead of a one-day survey of behavior. The study’s authors found that day-to-day variance fluctuates considerably from person-to-person. 

People who are usually honest have days in which they lie more than is typical for them and prolific liars have days in which they tell few lies. Generally, prolific liars exhibited much more day-to-day variation than the rest of the sample. And this variance was especially true for the top 1 % of liars who averaged 17 lies per day. The only respondents who did not vary much day-to-day were the 1 % who almost never lied…”

Axios: “Apple is adding a special “lockdown” mode designed for people such as dissidents, journalists or human rights workers who could become the targets of high-end spyware, such as NSO Group’s Pegasus. Why it matters: The new option, coming to Macs, iPads and iPhones with this year’s fall software update, could make it much harder for attackers to access such phones, but at the expense of a considerable amount of functionality. How it works: The feature can be turned on with a single change in settings, but the impact on how the phone works is significant…”