The Honorable J. Russell George
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), U.S. Department of the Treasury
• Testimony
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), U.S. Department of the Treasury
• Testimony
Politico op-ed: How to Get Trump’s Tax Returns—Without a Subpoena:
A 1924 law suggests Democrats can sue the Treasury Department if it doesn’t turn over the president’s taxes.
Congress’ pursuit of President Donald Trump’s tax returns is already hardening into a stalemate between the Democratic House and Trump’s Treasury Department. In his April 23 letter to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin again refused Neal’s request that the IRS turn over several years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, says the purpose of his request is congressional oversight. Mnuchin dismisses this explanation as contrived and contends that Neal’s real purpose is “to expose the president’s tax returns for the sake of exposure,” which Mnuchin claims is illegitimate.
Washington Post op-ed: Trump Just Gave the House a Very Good Reason to Look at His Tax Returns, by Daniel Hemel (Chicago):
The disclosure this week that Donald Trump accumulated a staggering $1.17 billion in losses from 1985 to 1994 was not, in itself, terribly surprising to anyone who has followed Trump’s financial travails. That’s because the same New York Times reporters who broke this week’s story — and who won a Pulitzer Prize for their investigations into the president’s personal finances — had previously unearthed state tax returns from 1995 showing that Trump claimed tax losses of close to $1 billion. What’s truly stunning, however, is how Trump responded to the news.
Rather than attributing the losses to business troubles from which he ultimately bounced back, President Trump insisted instead that the losses were conjured up to avoid taxes. “Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ ” he continued, adding that for real estate developers like him, tax ploys were “sport.”
It is the job of government to prevent a tragedy of the commons. That includes the commons of shared values and norms on which democracy depends. The dominant digital platform companies, including Facebook and Google, make their profits using business models that erode this commons. They have created a haven for dangerous misinformation and hate speech that has undermined trust in democratic institutions. And it is troubling when so much information is controlled by so few companies.
What is the best way to protect and restore this public commons? Most of the proposals to change platform companies rely on either antitrust law or regulatory action. I propose a different solution. Instead of banning the current business model — in which platform companies harvest user information to sell targeted digital ads — new legislation could establish a tax that would encourage platform companies to shift toward a healthier, more traditional model.
2019 Data Breach Investigations Report
“The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) provides you with crucial perspectives on threats that organizations like yours face. The 12th DBIR is built on real-world data from 41,686 security incidents and 2,013 data breaches provided by 73 data sources, both public and private entities, spanning 86 countries worldwide. Data breaches continue to make headlines around the world. Seemingly, no matter what defensive measures security professionals put in place, attackers are able to circumvent them. No organization is too large or too small to fall victim to a data breach. No industry vertical is immune to attack. Regardless of the type or amount of your organization’s data, there is someone out there who is trying to steal it. Having a sound understanding of the threats you and your peer organizations face, how they have evolved over time, and which tactics are most likely to be utilized can prepare you to manage these risks more effectively and efficiently.
- Take me to your leader – C-level executives were twelve times more likely to be the target of social incidents and nine times more likely to be the target of social breaches than in years past. To further underline the growth of financial social engineering attacks, both security incidents and data breaches that compromised executives rose from single digits to dozens in this report.
- Get out of my cloud – As companies continue to transition to more cost-efficient cloud-based solutions, their email and other valuable data migrate along with them. Criminals simply shift their focus and adapt their tactics to locate and steal the data they find to be of most value. Consequently, there’s been a corresponding increase in hacking cloud-based email servers via the use of stolen credentials. This is not an indication that cloud-based services are less secure, however. It is simply that phishing attacks, credential theft and configuration errors are a natural by-product of the process.
The tax that I propose would be applied to revenue from sales of targeted digital ads, which are the key to the operation of Facebook, Google and the like. At the federal level, Congress could add it as a surcharge to the corporate income tax. At the state level, a legislature could adopt it as a type of sales tax on the revenue a company collects for displaying ads to residents of the state.
Norwegian Tax Administration & University of Oslo, 9 May 2019. This paper conducts an audit assignment discontinuity in Norway based on individual tax payers risk scores. Additional data from a random audit the enables an estimate of how the audit effect varied across the risk score distribution. The results show that the current risk score audit threshold is set far above the one that maximizes net public revenue.
