'House of the Spicy Dragon': Why the Iron Throne Looks Different
Ten years ago Game of Thrones took over the world. Nothing else will come close.
Jim Bright - on spicy 🌶 Sneaks
Sneakiness is one of the most corrosive behaviours in the workplace.
It is perhaps a rung or two down from the big ones of sexual assault, bullying, harassment and fraud. Nonetheless, it also has the capacity to do untold damage to an organisation by demolishing trust and alienating staff, leading to disengagement.
Trust historically was not something people necessarily expected to find in the workplace. Managers in hierarchical organisations (i.e. nearly all of them) could leverage the power of their position to promote their agendas.
With the advent of the human resources movement, and the faddish adoption of “teams” as an organisational unit – and nowadays, God help us, as a form of address – trust was placed firmly on the agenda.
It was held that for teams to be successful they had to develop trust in their team members. Trust, it was declared, could be engendered by the open sharing of information. Information is power, and failing to share it inevitably creates power imbalances.
Many fine words and expensive training courses continue to be devoted to team bonding. These often include facile trust exercises such as falling backwards into the arms of one’s colleagues. Since the decline of the office Christmas party, and the blue-nosed attitudes towards supplying a surfeit of alcohol, the likelihood of stumbling backwards, and the opportunities for your colleagues’ catching practice have been diminished.
The problem with trust building is that it provides an excellent cover for the sneaky. Building expectations of open and even communication can create a room full of naive suckers ripe for manipulation by the sneaky.
Sneaks become sneaks, or are sustained in their sneakiness by pragmatism. If and when they are caught, they justify their actions with a needs-must argument. Of course this argument is never tested prior to their acts of sneakiness because they know full well their colleagues would never stand for it. However, usually there are enablers or patrons that stand to gain from the sneakiness, or at least avoid being a victim of it.
Sneakiness thrives because the majority of us do not go to work to engage in political games. Though ironically, given the recent news out of Canberra, even multiple experienced senior politicians can be surprised by covert acts.
At work, most of us do not want to have to run the numbers, hunt for hidden agendas, or think twice about what to share and with whom.
But this is the legacy when a culture of secret agendas and deals, leaking, back channelling, lobbying, teams within teams, withholding information, setting up people to fail, hanging people out to dry and every other Machiavellian tactic is allowed to get hold.
Hidden agendas: Why team building helps the sneaks in the workplace
PwC has fired nine people from the firm for workplace misconduct including bullying, sexual harassment and data breaches during the past year.
The firm investigated 31 Million allegations in the 2022 financial year, up from 13 the previous year, and substantiated 21 of the complaints. . .
The details of the allegations are included in the firm’s transparency report, published on Tuesday morning at the same time as it revealed its revenue and partner salaries for the year.
During 2021-22, the firm had to contend with complaints about the working conditions at a “skills hub” it operated in western Sydney, revealed by The Australian Financial Review in November.
The whistleblower later told a Senate inquiry into job security that all the 82 accountants hired at the hub at the time were from non-English speaking and migrant backgrounds and were asked to work 80 to 120 hours a week.
PwC denied the brunt of the whistleblower’s allegations but admitted it was revamping the skills hub program in response to staff complaints.
PwC fires nine people over misconduct
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Job shortage
Australian business leaders need to stop taking the lazy path of importing large numbers of cheap and acquiescent migrant labour to fill skills shortages and start actively engaging with the local education system to attract and produce the workers they need (“Voters fear wage cuts, cold on migration”, The Age, 24/8). The Australian economy cannot return to the past unsustainable Ponzi scheme of pouring in more and more immigrants as a lazy way to maintain positive growth. Our major cities are full and under infrastructure and environmental stress. Pouring in migrants to the same levels of the past will just exacerbate the situation and negatively impact the already strained quality of liveability. The solution needs to be a mixture of businesses proactively participating in the development of skills locally and a tempered immigration program to fill the genuine gaps.
Paul Miller, Box Hill South
Workers will need a place to live
As we prepare to increase migration to address the worker shortage, the question of where they will live must be addressed. An aspect of our housing shortage that doesn’t appear to get much attention is the rise in short-stay accommodation. A search on Airbnb around Rye, for example, shows 968 properties under the “entire place” category available for a short-stay rental. Even in Prahran and the surrounding area, there are 646 properties available.
Can we not take a more thoughtful approach by regulating – even capping the number of properties permitted for short stay – as has been done successfully in Europe, the US, Singapore, Japan and many other parts of the world.
Chris James, Mount Martha
Retirees the quick solution
Why do we need more immigration when a taxable adjustment for our retired citizens is all that is required to gain additional workers for industries across Australia? Allow a $400 weekly maximum tax threshold for retired pensioners and the uptake should be excellent. A two-minute legislative change is all that is needed.
Elizabeth Brown, Keysborough
Willing, able and experienced
Australia has an army of experienced and proficient people ready, willing and able to start work. I am 76 years young and work 30 hours per week, in a job that is enjoyable and meaningful. I’ve been doing it so long it’s my way of life. It keeps me healthy in mind and body and engaged with society and technology. The income gives me financial independence and I am not in need of a government pension. There are thousands like me, healthy and youthful senior citizens who would willingly seize the opportunity to go back to work on a part-time basis and feel useful again. We have the skills, we have the wisdom of maturity and we have the time. All we need is for the people who run this country to give us the call.
Sue Bracy, Mount Eliza
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Ernst Demands IRS Watchdog Audit Federal Agency’s Hiring and Re-Hiring Tax Cheats
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) wants Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) J. Russell George to audit the staff hiring and re-hiring practices of the IRS as the federal tax agency moves to double its workforce with President Joe Biden’s blessing.
The Iowa Republican told George in an Aug. 24 letter that her request was prompted by the fact that “earlier this month, Congress passed and Biden signed legislation to double the size of the IRS workforce so the agency can more aggressively audit America’s taxpayers.
“The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says with the supersized staff, the IRS audit rate ‘would rise for all taxpayers,’ regardless of income, which will ‘result in some audits of taxpayers who would later be determined not to owe additional taxes.’”
Among the results of adding 87,000 new IRS agents to the 80,000 the agency presently employs, Ernst said, could be that “innocent, hardworking Americans” will be “subjected to unfair and costly IRS audits when the agency is ignoring tax cheats on its own payroll.”
Ernst was referring to reports compiled and published by TIGTA investigators in 2017 and 2019 that found the IRS had hired and rehired thousands of employees who had not paid their taxes.
“In April 2019, TIGTA released a report, ‘Improvements Are Needed to Ensure That Employee Tax Compliance Cases Are Adjudicated Consistently,’ that found 1,250 IRS employees had not paid their tax bills in full or on time, including hundreds of whom, were willfully delinquent or repeat offenders, and that the tax collecting agency had done little to discipline these tax cheats on its own payroll,” Ernst told George.
“A 2017 TIGTA review, ‘The Internal Revenue Service Continues to Rehire Former Employees With Conduct and Performance Issues,’ found that the IRS rehired hundreds of former employees who ‘had been terminated from the IRS or separated while under investigation for a substantiated conduct or performance issue.'”
The rehires included some who were fired or resigned for “willful failure to properly file their federal tax returns,” Ernst continued.
In a separate statement in which Ernst announced she is giving the IRS her latest Squeal Award, the Iowa Republican said that among the excuses the IRS tax cheats offered to investigators were not knowing how to use TurboTax to prepare a tax return and forgetting to report all of their income.
“We have a real problem if the IRS staff who enforce the tax law aren’t paying their own taxes and can’t even understand how to properly fill out the agency’s tax forms!” Ernst said in the statement. “I’ve heard enough of the excuses and these Washington double standards.
“The IRS needs to start living under its own rules and that’s why I am demanding that we audit the IRS!”
The statement said Ernst selected the “soon-to-be supersized IRS” for the award because she fears the tax agency will be “going after hardworking taxpayers while ignoring the tax cheats on their own payroll.”
A TIGTA spokesman declined to comment on the Ernst letter.
Biden’s plan to more than double the IRS workforce would likely be controversial at any time, but debate on it in Congress and the media was made even more intense because the agency has struggled in recent years to process paper tax returns efficiently and quickly.
National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins told Congress earlier this year that little progress has been made by the IRS in dealing with a mounting backlog of unprocessed tax returns.
“When the returns included direct-deposit information, taxpayers received refunds promptly. However, for millions of taxpayers who had inconsistencies or errors in their returns, or who filed paper returns, the 2022 filing season was not much better than last year, and these taxpayers will be waiting for refunds for six months or longer,” Collins told Congress in her review of the 2022 filing season.
“At the end of the 2022 filing season, the IRS and taxpayers still faced long delays in processing paper original returns, electronic returns with inconsistencies, and electronic and paper-filed amended returns, as well as the backlog of correspondence the IRS still needed to address from 2021 plus the 2022 correspondence.
“The high level of backlog and the corresponding delays have strained the IRS, its employees, and most importantly, taxpayers,” Collins wrote
Ernst Demands IRS Watchdog Audit Federal Agency’s Hiring and Re-Hiring Tax Cheats
