IRS Turmoil May Deter Future Leadership:

Secret police strike force hunts Australian accused of leading international crime syndicate

Bloomberg Law, IRS Turmoil May Deter Future Leadership:

The surprise withdrawal of Donald Korb’s nominationfor the top IRS attorney position puts the Trump administration in an uphill struggle to find the next nominee.

 

 Narotzki Reviews McGee, Yuzbasi, Kisa & Benk’s The Role of Emotions in Tax Evasion

Tristan Navera, Bloomberg Law: Three Must-Watch Litigation Issues for Tax Professionals in 2026:

A deluge of legal challenges to Trump administration actions in 2025 are likely to generate rulings next year that will reshape many areas of federal tax law and could alter how the IRS conducts business.

Irish defence minister confirms plans to scrap Irish neutrality The Canary

As Europe rearms, ‘Made in India’ is entering the EU’s defence equation Euractiv

Been spendin’ most their lives livin’ in the free trade paradise China Articles

Italy church restoration probed after Meloni angel lookalike DW

 

Judge's Missing Tax Refund Found

 "Fraudulent Diversion" Forces Judge To Consider Recusal

PETER GOSNELL 3 DECEMBER 2025 

Consider the all too convenient and unlikely coincidence at the heart of this tale and despair. Some five months after finding Sydney man Nahi Gazal to be in contempt of court over almost $5 million withdrawn from bank accounts that were the subject of freezing orders, the ruling judge this week declared that he may have to recuse himself from further hearings after learning that his tax refund had been fraudulently diverted.

In the NSW Supreme Court on Monday, Corporations List judge Ashley Black advised the legal representatives for plaintiff and defendant in Deputy Commissioner of Taxation v Westmeat Development Pty Ltd as Trustee for Westmeat Development Trust that he had to consider disqualifying himself after being informed last Thursday by the ATO that there had been a "fraudulent change of his bank account details" in regard to payment of his tax refund.

Describing his refund as a "material amount" Justice Black said he must seriously consider disqualifying himself from continuing to hear the matter given any future decisions he might make would be vulnerable to accusations of bias.

Speaking to an almost deserted court room the judge said the ATO had not provided him with any information about how the

"fraudulent diversion" of his refund was executed, though it is difficult to imagine how anyone other than an ATO employee could covertly alter a taxpayer's bank account details… 

Judge's Missing Tax Refund Found 

 PETER GOSNELL 4 FEBRUARY 2026 

Rest easy. The judge who last year said he might need to recuse himself from hearing a contempt of court case involving Sydney man Nahi Gazal this week gave the all clear. 

On Monday the judge told counsel for the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation (DCoT) that he had received his tax refund. In December the judge revealed that he had been contacted by the tax office after it discovered his refund had gone missing. At the time the judge said the ATO had described the ・・・

A collection of “well-made apps and sites”

A collection of “well-made apps and sites”gathered by Marcin Wichary.

CAFFEINE, IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO?  Brewing possibilities: Using caffeine to edit gene expression.

learning that so many of the victims of Epstein’s reign of sexual terrorism were orphaned and impoverished Eastern European girls is unfortunately demonstrative that it was the Pedophile’s Den unleashed and catalyzed when the USSR was dissolved; the dissolution of the Soviet Union produced a vacuum of protection and accountability proved advantageous to international networks of sexual enslavement rings embedded in criminal world economies sustained by imperialism.

The Twisted Flight Paths of ‘Global Girl’ and the Lolita Express

Model-turned-pilot Nadia Marcinko, an alleged accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, is among a group of girls who came to the Epstein syndicate—presumably by plane—from abroad.

The available manifests record no flight of “NM” to Bratislava, or anywhere in Slovakia, which Marcinko told a plane enthusiast magazine was her home country. (And because the manifests from 2000 are not available, it’s still not clear whether she left home in an Epstein plane.) On March 22, 2019, though, Epstein’s Gulfstream GV-SP flew from Paris to Bratislava—and returned five hours later.

A WhatsApp bug lets malicious media files spread through group chats Malwarebytes

If You’ve Installed Any of These 17 Browser Extensions, Delete Them Now

Lifehacker: “Another wave of malicious browser extensions capable of tracking user activity and compromising privacy have been found across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, some of which may have been active for up to five years. 

The campaign, known as GhostPoster, was identified by Koi Security in December and included 17 Firefox add-ons designed to monitor users’ browsing activity. 

Threat actors planted malicious JavaScript code in the extension’s PNG logo, which served as a malware loader to retrieve the main payload from a remote server. Researchers at LayerX have found an additional 17 malicious extensions across multiple browsers that have collectively been installed more than 840,000 times…”

Government Unconstitutionally Labels ICE Observers as Domestic Terrorists

• ICE Making List of Anyone Who Films Them. “We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” Ken Klippenstein
• ICE’s Secret Watchlists of Americans Sparta, Reaper and Grapevine track protesters, their friends (+ others) – Ken Klippenstein
• Wired [no paywall] – Meta Is Blocking Links to ICE List on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – Users of Meta’s social platforms can no longer share links to ICE List, a website listing what it claims are the names of thousands of DHS employees.
• Washington Post – The powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal to track suspects — and protesters. Biometric trackers, cellphone location databases and drones are among the surveillance technologies that federal agents are tapping in their deportation campaign.

Cato Institute Report – “On December 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ) disseminated a memorandum to all federal prosecutors creating a strategy for arresting and charging individuals supposedly aligned with “Antifa.” 

The memo requires DOJ to investigate and identify the “most serious, most readily provable” crimes committed by potential targets, including those with “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders.” Specifically, the document defines domestic terrorism broadly to include “doxing” and “impeding” immigration and other law enforcement. 

Doxing is not specifically defined, but the memo references calls to require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to give their names and operate unmasked. Individuals who donate to organizations that “impede” or “dox” will be investigated and deemed to have supported “domestic terrorism.” 

Therefore, it is crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in “impeding.” DHS has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them. 

The purpose of this post is to establish that these incidents are not isolated overreach by individual agents, but rather, an official, nationwide policy of intimidating and threatening people who attempt to observe and record DHS operations. This matters legally because courts are more likely to enjoin an official policy rather than impose some new requirements to stop sporadic, uncoordinated actions by individual agents…

• People have a right to record law enforcement during their operations, as my colleague Walter Olson describes in more depth.
• People generally have a right to protest, yell out, insult, swear at, and even “verbally interrupt” law enforcement during their operations.
• People generally have a right to post the names of law enforcement agents, including undercover agents, unless it is done with a provable intent to threaten them.
• People have a right to generally warn others about the presence of law enforcement, for example, by holding a sign, honking, flashing lights, or livestreaming.
• Honking can only be limited through a content-neutral, traffic-safety statute, which does not exist under federal law.
• People may not be arrested or detained, even for real technical traffic violations, if the officers are motivated by a desire to retaliate against their speech and the arrest or detention would not have otherwise been made…”

INTERTAX: Special Issue on Zucman’s Billionaire Tax

 Managing The Powerful Aurelien

Sensible people are baffled as to why the United Kingdom has as its Prime Minister a man whose sole aim seems to be to destroy the country and impose a communist-style totalitarianism. John Ellwood speculates that he is an agent of the unseen powers that are destroying Europe, Canada and the Antipodes. He believes that during Starmer’s time in Czechoslovakia in 1986 he was conditioned to become the heartless autocrat we see today.

CzechoSlovakia Project Starmer: The making of a Marxist stooge

INTERTAX: Special Issue on Zucman’s Billionaire Tax

INTERTAX has released a special issue on Gabriel Zucman’s “billionaire tax” proposal (volume 54, issue 1). From U.S. institutions, contributors include Jayati Ghosh (U. Mass., Econ.), Dan Shaviro (NYU), and Matt Zwolinski (U. San Diego, Inst. L. & Phil.). Contributions, with abstracts, below the fold.

Ana Paula Dourado (EIC) & Alice Pirlot (Geneva Graduate Inst.), Editorial: The Zucman Tax, 54 INTERTAX 3 (2026) (introducing the debate)

Gabriel Zucman (Paris Sch. Econ.), Debate: The Billionaire Tax: A (Modest) Proposal for the 21st Century, 54 INTERTAX 7 (2026) (summarizing the proposal)

Huub Brouwer (Tilburg U.) & Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht U.), Debate: The Normative Case for a Global Minimum Tax on Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals, 54 INTERTAX 9 (2026)

IRS Enforcement Leadership Changes

Bloomberg Law: IRS Leader Shake-Up Bleeds Criminal, Civil Enforcement Oversight

The line between tax auditors policing mere civil infractions versus serious tax crimes is blurring in the latest reorganization at the top of the IRS.

 David Elkins (Netanya), Embracing Tax Avoidance, 34 U. Fla. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 327 (2024):

Avoidance is a major theme in tax law jurisprudence. Congress, the Treasury, and the courts have developed numerous doctrines to deny beneficial treatment when the taxpayer’s principal purpose or presumed principal purpose was the avoidance of taxation. Each attempt to shut down tax avoidance then becomes the opening salvo in the next round of engagement as tax planners devise means of circumventing the restrictions and new rules are developed to counter the latest avoidance maneuvers.

 

And so It Begins: AIs Now Talking With One Another Behind Our Backs

Meet the scourge of the mafia Leonardo Sciascia exposed Sicily’s rotten core

Slovakia PM's national security adviser resigns over Epstein links

Fico announced he had accepted Lajčák's departure in a message, describing the adviser as "an incredible source of experience in diplomacy and foreign policy"

Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act Department of Justice

Elon Musk Emailed Extensively With Jeffrey Epstein, Asking to Visit His Notorious Island Futurism

Stunning Epstein twist as Ghislaine Maxwell claims 29 friends cut ‘secret deals’ with DOJ Daily Mail 

Companies reap $22bn from Trump’s immigration crackdown Palantir and Deloitte among beneficiaries of spending by government agencies

 Palantir and Deloitte among beneficiaries of spending by government agencies

Ice obtains access to Israeli-made spyware that can hack phones and encrypted apps

This article is more than 4 months old

Trump administration contract with Paragon Solutions gives immigration agency access to one of the most powerful stealth cyberweapons

The powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal to track suspects — and protesters

https://archive.md/OHBgPBiometric trackers, cellphone location databases and drones are among the surveillance technologies that federal agents are tapping in their deportation campaign

🦋🐉 https://archive.md/OHBgP

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/ice-surveillance-immigrants-protesters/

The billionaire boys fight the wealth tax Oligarch Watch

All the Lonely People: An Integrated Review and Research Agenda on Work and Loneliness. Julie M. McCarthy, Berrin Erdogan, Emily Campion. Journal of Management [Open Access]. Volume 52, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241313320

“Decades of studies spanning multiple disciplines have provided insight into the critical role of loneliness in work contexts. In spite of this extensive research, a comprehensive review of loneliness and work remains absent. 

To address this gap, we conducted a multidisciplinary review of relevant theory and research and identified 213 articles reporting on 233 empirical studies from management, organizational psychology, sociology, medicine, and other domains to uncover why people feel lonely, how different features of work can contribute to feelings of loneliness, and the implications of employee loneliness for organizational settings. This enabled a critical examination of the distinct conceptualizations and operationalizations of loneliness that have been advanced and the theories underpinning this scholarship. 

We developed a comprehensive conceptual model that integrates cognitive discrepancy theory, the affect theory of social exchange, and evolutionary theory. 

This model elucidates the core antecedents, mediators, outcomes, moderators, and interventions forming the nomological network of work related loneliness, including cross-level influences within teams and among leaders. Our review also identifies a number of promising areas for future inquiry to improve our understanding and measurement of loneliness, the process of experiencing and managing loneliness in the workplace, and potential interventions to reduce it. 

Finally, we provide tangible guidance for organizations and practitioners on how to address and mitigate employee loneliness. Ultimately, our review underscores the complex nature of loneliness and work and establishes a foundation for advancing both scholarly discourse and organizational practices in this critical domain.”

Government rejects bid to allow politicians to kill consulting deals

Tax heavyhitter Orme takes up top TPB role

Government rejects major reforms and gives ‘big four’ firms a reprieve

The Albanese government has given consultants a ‘massive reprieve’ by rejecting most Senate recommendations to overhaul consulting contracts after the PwC tax leaks scandal.

The Australian government has handed the big four consulting firms a massive reprieve in its official response to the Senate inquiry into the PwC tax leaksscandal.

The Albanese government released its response on the Friday afternoon before the Australia Day long weekend, and has chosen bureaucratic tinkering over the structural demolition many demanded, according to former KPMG partner turned whistleblower Brendan Lyon. 

Of the 12 recommendations from the Finance and Public Administration References Committee, the government has only fully agreed to three, preferring to agree “in principle” or “in part” to four. It disagreed or simply “noted” the remaining four. And merely “noted” the aggressive overhaul proposed by the Greens.

When the PwC tax leaks scandal first broke three years ago, it shocked the public and shone the spotlight on billions of taxpayer dollars the government was spending on consultants; particularly the so-called big four of PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte. 

..

Government rejects bid to allow politicians to kill consulting deals

 Edmund Tadros  Feb 2, 2026 

Labor has rejected a bipartisan proposal that would have allowed a parliamentary committee to cancel large consultancy contracts, saying the sweeping changes it has already made in the way that the public sector can engage professional services firms are working.

In a belated response to a Senate inquiry, which published its report 19 months ago, the Albanese government separately noted without comment dozens of recommendations made by the Greens, including that PwC and any firm run by its former chief executive, Luke Sayers, be banned from being awarded any contracts from the federal public service for five years.

Senator Deborah O’Neill questions former PwC chief executive Luke Sayers at a committee hearing in 2023. Alex Ellinghausen

The Senate inquiry was established in 2023, after the disclosure that a PwC partner had used confidential government tax proposals to further the interests of the firm and its clients. The committee was chaired by Liberal senator Richard Colbeck, but the questioning of firm executives was led by Labor senator Deborah O’Neill and Greens senator Barbara Pocock.

The inquiry was one of a number of investigations into a scandal that led to PwC selling its public sector consulting division for $1, the government reducing its use of the big four consultancies, an unprecedented crackdown on tax advisers, and reforms to government procurement.

The government response to the 12 bipartisan recommendations noted changes had already been made to increase contract transparency, to tighten the way consulting services are bought, and to oblige consultants to train public servants during projects they are working on. Almost 12,000 public servants received procurement training in the past four years.

Review committee would ‘create legal risk’

The government rejected a recommendation to create a parliamentary review committee for large consulting contracts because it would “create legal risk” by politicising purchasing decisions.

Colbeck, who has introduced a private member’s bill to establish such a committee, rejected the government’s description of its role.

“The purpose of the committee would be to provide parliamentary scrutiny of public spending on consulting firms and ensure value for money,” he said.

The government, in its response, said recommendations to review partnership laws governing the big consulting firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – and force professional bodies to report to parliament would be considered by a still-unpublished Treasury review of the sector.

The Treasury consultation, which closed to submissions in June 2024, is examining reform of the fragmented and light-touch regulation of accounting partnerships in Australia, whose auditing, tax advisory and insolvency services are of systemic importance to the economy.

The government response said PwC was responsible for a recommendation that the firm “promptly publish accurate and detailed information about the involvement of PwC partners and personnel” involved in the leaks.

Senator Pocock said it was “unsurprising but extremely disappointing that the government was offering only very small tweaks to procurement but won’t touch essential bold structural reform with a 12-foot pole”.

O’Neill welcomed the response but urged her “colleagues in government to remain extremely vigilant about the operations of these consulting firms and their relationship with government”.

Comment was sought from PwC and Sayers.

Final recommendations and government response

1. 1PwC should publish details about all partners and personnel involved in the breach of confidential government information. Government response: This recommendation is for PwC to respond to.
2. 2Service providers should be obliged to act in the public interest when working for the Commonwealth. Response: The government agrees in principle with the recommendation.
3. 3The Finance Department to improve the training of officials undertaking procurement. Response: The government agrees with the recommendation.
4. 4Contracts should factor in knowledge transfer from consultants to the Australian Public Service. Response: The government agrees with the recommendation.
5. 5Service providers should be required to (a) act in the public interest and (b) incorporate elements from the accountants’ ethics code that align with public sector values. Response: The government agrees in principle with the recommendation.
6. 6Finance should provide guidance on managing conflicts of interest. Response: The government agrees with the recommendation.
7. 7Finance should develop a register of conflict-of-interest breaches by service providers. Response: The government notes the recommendation.
8. 8Finance should enhance transparency and details on AusTender. Response: The government agrees in principle with the recommendation.
9. 9The Australian Law Reform Commission should undertake a review of partnership law and recommend reforms. Response: The government notes the recommendation.
10. 10The Commonwealth should force professional bodies to report annually to a parliamentary committee. Response: The government notes the recommendation.
11. 11Parliament should legislate to establish a committee to review and approve consultancy and services worth $15 million or more. Response: The government does not agree with the recommendation.
12. 12The finance minister should report to parliament twice a year on Commonwealth consulting contracts worth $2 million or more. Response: The government agrees in part with this recommendation.

Find out the inside scoop about Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC and McKinsey. Sign up to our weekly Professional Life newsletter.

Edmund Tadros leads our coverage of the professional services sector. He is based in our Sydney newsroom. Email Edmund at edmundtadros@afr.com.au