On Saturday 13 July 2024 AD the SMH will fail to provide the crossword in its Spectrum pages … Bizarre misprint …
BREAKING: Corrupt
officer involved in 2019 Bruce Lehrmann rape cover-up charged today with perjury and other serious crimes 
AFP officer Trent Madders has been charged today with perjury, concealing evidence and perverting the course of justice for events that took place in 2019 and 2020.
Madders was one of five AFP officers who recently attempted to sue ACT prosecutor Shane Drumgold for defamation after he correctly stated there was political interference in the police investigation into the 2019 rape attack by Liberal Party adviser Bruce Lehrmann inside Parliament House.
Just a few weeks ago, the police officers including Madders dropped their defamation action and were ordered to pay $12,000 in costs to Drumgold.
The Tax Office will receive details of accounts that make over $12,000 a year to identify hobbyists-turned-businesses and those misreporting income.
The Tax Office will force Amazon and eBay to hand over details of up to 30,000 account holders to crack down on sellers who misreport income in their BAS and tax returns.
The data-matching program would target users who make more than $12,000 in sales, according to a government gazette notice this week, with the ATO gaining access to their personal, business and account details.
“The data helps us increase our understanding of the behaviours and compliance profiles of individuals and businesses that sell goods or services via online selling platforms,” the ATO said.
The ATO said it planned to use the information to detect unregistered businesses operating in the digital space and ensure taxpayers who have gone from selling as a hobby to carrying on a business complied with their tax obligations.
“Where the online selling data reveals discrepancies between online sales and information declared in the sellers' tax returns, we will investigate further,” it said.
Amazon and eBay are the top marketplaces in Australia’s $60 billion e-commerce industry.
The total value of merchandise sold through Amazon.com.au totalled $4.9 billion in 2023, with the e-commerce giant surpassing eBay in sales earlier this year.
The ATO has conducted online seller data matching programs since 2008.
Its latest initiative would see it collect sales data for the 2023-24 and 2025-26 financial years and compel Amazon and eBay to hand over sellers' personal details, such as their name, date of birth, residential address, phone number and email address.
To detect discrepancies between online sales and reported income, the ATO would also collect details of businesses and accounts, including their business and account name, IP address of the account holder, number and value of monthly and annual sales transactions.
Meryl Johnston, founder of e-commerce accounting firm Bean Ninjas, said non-compliance issues could arise from people with multiple income streams making honest mistakes by forgetting to include income from certain platforms.
“When we start working with new clients, we do see mistakes where sometimes an entire sales platform, particularly if it's not their main channel will just be left off and not connected to Xero, and so then what's being submitted to the ATO is actually missing some of that information,” she said.
“It's normally a mistake. It's not that people are purposely not doing the wrong thing.”
Johnston said the availability of data from Amazon and eBay would help the ATO detect on-compliance among businesses more efficiently compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
“It would be easier to data match with Amazon and eBay than if you had a shopfront with people coming in, making some purchases through a credit card or debit card, and then some cash,” she said.
“They’re going to match up to 30,000 accounts – it would be pretty hard to do that with brick-and-mortar stores.”
The ATO expected the “sophisticated” systems used by Amazon and eBay to result in data “of a high standard”.
It said from each financial year would be retained for five years and would not be used to initiate automated compliance activity.
“The program supports the development and implementation of engagement and assurance strategies to increase voluntary compliance, which may include educational or compliance activities. It gives assurance that participants are doing the right thing,” the ATO said.
The ATO’s online seller data matching program comes after it announced one for Medicare levy claims last month.
In February, also acquired personal details and rental bond information of 900,000 landlords from state and territory rental bond regulators to tighten compliance around rental bond income.
On Saturday 13 July 2024 AD the SMH will fail to provide the crossword in its Spectrum pages … Bizarre misprint …
BREAKING: Corrupt
officer involved in 2019 Bruce Lehrmann rape cover-up charged today with perjury and other serious crimes
AFP officer Trent Madders has been charged today with perjury, concealing evidence and perverting the course of justice for events that took place in 2019 and 2020.
Madders was one of five AFP officers who recently attempted to sue ACT prosecutor Shane Drumgold for defamation after he correctly stated there was political interference in the police investigation into the 2019 rape attack by Liberal Party adviser Bruce Lehrmann inside Parliament House.
Just a few weeks ago, the police officers including Madders dropped their defamation action and were ordered to pay $12,000 in costs to Drumgold.
The Tax Office will receive details of accounts that make over $12,000 a year to identify hobbyists-turned-businesses and those misreporting income.
The Tax Office will force Amazon and eBay to hand over details of up to 30,000 account holders to crack down on sellers who misreport income in their BAS and tax returns.
The data-matching program would target users who make more than $12,000 in sales, according to a government gazette notice this week, with the ATO gaining access to their personal, business and account details.
“The data helps us increase our understanding of the behaviours and compliance profiles of individuals and businesses that sell goods or services via online selling platforms,” the ATO said.
The ATO said it planned to use the information to detect unregistered businesses operating in the digital space and ensure taxpayers who have gone from selling as a hobby to carrying on a business complied with their tax obligations.
“Where the online selling data reveals discrepancies between online sales and information declared in the sellers' tax returns, we will investigate further,” it said.
Amazon and eBay are the top marketplaces in Australia’s $60 billion e-commerce industry.
The total value of merchandise sold through Amazon.com.au totalled $4.9 billion in 2023, with the e-commerce giant surpassing eBay in sales earlier this year.
The ATO has conducted online seller data matching programs since 2008.
Its latest initiative would see it collect sales data for the 2023-24 and 2025-26 financial years and compel Amazon and eBay to hand over sellers' personal details, such as their name, date of birth, residential address, phone number and email address.
To detect discrepancies between online sales and reported income, the ATO would also collect details of businesses and accounts, including their business and account name, IP address of the account holder, number and value of monthly and annual sales transactions.
Meryl Johnston, founder of e-commerce accounting firm Bean Ninjas, said non-compliance issues could arise from people with multiple income streams making honest mistakes by forgetting to include income from certain platforms.
“When we start working with new clients, we do see mistakes where sometimes an entire sales platform, particularly if it's not their main channel will just be left off and not connected to Xero, and so then what's being submitted to the ATO is actually missing some of that information,” she said.
“It's normally a mistake. It's not that people are purposely not doing the wrong thing.”
Johnston said the availability of data from Amazon and eBay would help the ATO detect on-compliance among businesses more efficiently compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
“It would be easier to data match with Amazon and eBay than if you had a shopfront with people coming in, making some purchases through a credit card or debit card, and then some cash,” she said.
“They’re going to match up to 30,000 accounts – it would be pretty hard to do that with brick-and-mortar stores.”
The ATO expected the “sophisticated” systems used by Amazon and eBay to result in data “of a high standard”.
It said from each financial year would be retained for five years and would not be used to initiate automated compliance activity.
“The program supports the development and implementation of engagement and assurance strategies to increase voluntary compliance, which may include educational or compliance activities. It gives assurance that participants are doing the right thing,” the ATO said.
The ATO’s online seller data matching program comes after it announced one for Medicare levy claims last month.
In February, also acquired personal details and rental bond information of 900,000 landlords from state and territory rental bond regulators to tighten compliance around rental bond income.
ATO to crack down on Amazon, eBay sellers’ tax affairs
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A good insight from Eliot Higgins, the head of the intelligence service Bellingcat.
When a lot of people think about AI, they think, “Oh, it’s going to fool people into believing stuff that’s not true.” But what it’s really doing is giving people permission to not believe stuff that is true. Because they can say, “Oh, that’s an AI-generated image. AI can generate anything now: video, audio, the entire war zone re-created.” They will use it as an excuse.
From an extensive interview in Wired.
Addendum: A case in point.
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The consumer-optimal reporting probability is monotone in a proper scoring rule, a statistical measure of the amount of “news” in the realization relative to the consumer’s prior. We show that a particular scoring rule drawn from the statistics literature parsimoniously captures key patterns in reporting probabilities across several domains of US television news. We argue that the scoring rule can serve as a useful control variable in settings where a researcher wishes to test for bias in news reporting. Controlling for the score greatly lessens the appearance of bias in our applications.
That is a new paper from Luis Armona, Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica, and Jesse M. Shapiro. I take this to mean the actual bias is more toward surprising news than negative news per se?
