Friday, June 18, 2021

Employees Are Lonelier Than Ever. Here’s How Employers Can Help

Major banks' online services, airline systems go down



Transport for NSW was hit in December with a hack of a file transfer system owned by international company Accellion. In February, Transport for NSW alerted the public.

“The Accellion system was widely used to share and store files by organisations around the world, including Transport for NSW,” the agency said.

“Before the attack on Accellion servers was interrupted, some Transport for NSW information was taken.”




Tax inVoice - Cyber security for business and intermediaries part 1 (ato.gov.au)




Fully public tax information?

Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency.

Here is the paper by Zoe B. Cullen and Bobak Paksad-Hurson, which focuses on pay transparency, not taxes per se.



We Ran The Treasury Department. This Is How To Fix Tax Evasion.


What makes a news story trustworthy?

“Americans see a variety of factors as important when it comes to deciding whether a news story is trustworthy or not, but their attitudes vary by party affiliation, demographic characteristics and news consumption habits, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Overall, broad majorities of U.S. adults say it is at least somewhat important to consider each of five surveyed factors when determining whether a news story is trustworthy or not: the news organization that publishes it (88%); the sources cited in it (86%); their gut instinct about it (77%); the person, if any, who shared it with them (68%); and the specific journalist who reported it (66%). Just 24% of adults say it’s at least somewhat important to consider a sixth factor included in the survey: whether the story has a lot of shares, comments or likes on social media…”



Employees Are Lonelier Than Ever. Here’s How Employers Can Help.


Harvard Business Review: “Rising rates of loneliness among employees during the pandemic have put the well-being of employees top of mind for most companiesas they map out the future of work. They know that loneliness brings health problems, reduced productivity, turnover, and burnout. Some, including JPMorgan and Google, have already declared a return to the office. While increasing face-to-face interaction may be beneficial for some aspects of work, it will not, by itself, create strong interpersonal bonds among colleagues. If it did, my research with INSEAD professor Mark Mortensen wouldn’t have shown high rates of loneliness in employees prior to the shift to social distancing and remote work. Whatever form the return to the workplace takes, building high-quality connections will require a focused set of structures and practices built on a bedrock of psychological safety. Here are the five important elements to consider…”


Making sure the ‘big people’ pay their taxes would be a boost to democracy (16 Jun 2021)


YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: What ProPublica Gets Wrong About the Wealthy and Taxes.

ProPublica obtained the tax returns of the richest Americans and discoveredwhat every informed person already knew: They don’t pay as much in income taxes as some people would like them to. This is being called a great scandal by many Democrats and liberal journalists.

Meanwhile, that these returns were almost surely leaked by someone at the IRS seems not to bother a lot of the same people. There’s no way ProPublica got this information from dozens of high-priced accountants and attorneys. Barring the possibility that this was a computer hack—which itself would be a monumental scandal—this is outrageous. Weaponizing the IRS for political purposes is not just a crime, it is a long-term political disaster.

But I want to focus on the fake scandal.

Billionaires often pay little in income taxes because billionaires don’t typically make their money from a salary. Billionaires exist for the most part because they own assets—stocks, businesses, commodities, property, etc.—and the paper value of those assets amounts to the bulk of their wealth. And in America, we do not tax wealth.

Nor should we.

Let’s say you collect baseball cards. On paper, your collection is worth a bundle. But its real value is realized only when you sell it. Do you think the IRS should tax you every year for what your collection could be worth if you sold it? Do you want the IRS to tax you for the value of your wedding ring—not at purchase, but forever—even if you’re never going to sell it?

The same principle applies to other unrealized gains. If your stock portfolio increases in value, you get taxed on your gains when you sell.

ProPublica ignores all this. “We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period,” they explain. “We’re going to call this their true tax rate.”

Except it’s not a true tax rate.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Return of the IRS Scandal. “This still leaves the real scandal, which is that someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more to chase a fanciful amount of uncollected taxes. As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect ‘gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.’ Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? The IRS says it has begun an investigation into the tax-return disclosure, and by all means send the guilty to prison. But Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.”


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