Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Why organised crime puts its money on online gambling

The political and professional services complex continue to be stunned about how former PwC poster boy Luke Sayers has dodged the fallout for the destruction of the firm he once led.
Careers ruined, court cases in train, hundreds of millions of dollars in billables evaporated. Sayers has pushed himself right out of the picture to escape only lightly scathed.
He remains Carlton Football Club president, a man so keen to win a flag he asked the club’s members to extend his presidency beyond the regular term. That window is closing, with the Blues limping to September and captain Patrick Cripps not getting any younger. And as far as his professional life goes, business is booming.
His eponymous Sayers Group is on a recruiting drive, hiring a slew of new people to fill out his management consultancy business. According to eight job ads posted online, Sayers is looking for consultants focused on deals and strategy, particularly those with experience in consulting, private equity and the “big four”.
Roll up, roll up, here comes the poacher! Imagine being an early-career associate at EY, or Deloitte, or KPMG, or hell, even PwC. The partner track is rooted. Those colleagues who aren’t sacked, are weighing up the in-house life. Then there’s Sayers, swinging his whip offering you a new life. Do you take it?
Even crazier is that part of the recruiting drive involves hiring people to join “our growing Canberra team of strategy specialists working with the federal government”. Incredible,
So, while his old shop’s government business has been razed to the ground, phoenixed into a private equity subsiduary, Sayers is getting so many projects on the taxpayer’s dime that he needs more headcount.
When accountability was doled out for the PwC mess, Sayers wasn’t in the room. If only making excuses could help his Blues.


New laws to rein in rogue tax agents will deter accountants from seeking mental health help, says professional body Chartered Accountants ANZ, a claim denied by the federal government and the chairman of the tax regulator.
CA ANZ has also made the disputed claim that the wording of the updated code of professional conduct for tax agents will force agents to disclose when they are under any investigation, not just when they have been found guilty of wrongdoing.

CA ANZ chief executive Ainslie van Onselen, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones and TPB chairman Peter de Cure. 

The ongoing battle over laws to update the tax agents’ code of professional conduct has pitted a coalition of 10 professional associations against Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones. The federal Coalition has said it will oppose the rules, scheduled to come before the Senate next month.

The associations have complained about a lack of consultation and are demanding changes to the proposed laws, leading to a delay in when they come into effect.

Mr Jones says the new rules will prevent a repeat of the PwC tax leaks scandal, where former partner Peter Collins shared confidential government information, and tighten up self-regulation of the sector that has been found to be “insufficient”.

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Separately, CA ANZ said four investigations into members linked to the tax leaks matter have or will be paused until nine separate inquiries into the scandal by the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) are completed. CA ANZ admitted last year it had mistakenly allowed Mr Collins to resign as a member after he was sanctioned by the board.

CA ANZ chief executive Ainslie van Onselen writes in The Australian Financial Review: “Our top concern [about the new code] is the requirement for tax professionals to advise all current and prospective clients of ‘any matter’ that could ‘significantly influence’ a decision of a client to engage them or continue to engage them.”

‘Deeply concerned’ over code

The body’s legal advice is that the updated code could require tax agents to disclose private medical and mental health information to clients.

Ms van Onselen writes she is “deeply concerned that these new obligations will disincentivise CA ANZ members seeking mental health help” over fears it would have to be disclosed to clients.

She is also worried tax agents will have to “disclose to clients if they are subject to an investigation by the TPB, or any other body”, noting that “an investigation by the TPB doesn’t always mean inappropriate behaviour has occurred”.

CA ANZ has presented the government with amended wording that limits mandatory client disclosures to when findings have been made against the agent.

In response, Mr Jones said “the accounting bodies know that is not true” that clients would be forced to tell clients about any mental health issues. Rather, tax agents would be obliged to disclose significant matters that a client should know about before hiring them for work.

“The Collins’ affair shows that someone could be in breach of the law and they had no obligation to inform their clients about that,” Mr Jones said.

He said the new rules – along with enhanced powers of the TPB – were designed to legislate professional obligations that had previously been subject to self-regulation by the sector.

“What the Collins’ affair demonstrated is that the [tax] practitioners regulations were not up to scratch. We are aiming to fix this,” Mr Jones said.

Self-regulation by the professional bodies had “been shown to be insufficient and these changes will uplift it”.

TPB chairman Peter de Cure said the board was consulting the sector on its formal guidance ahead of the rules coming into effect for large firms in January.

No disclosure expectation: de Cure

He said there was no expectation that tax agents would have to disclose their mental health status to clients.

“There are no circumstances where we expect a professional disclose a mental or physical health condition to clients,” Mr de Cure said.

“You are obligated to disclose to a client when you will be unable to do work for them. You do not need to inform them why this is the case. What practitioners can’t do is say to a client they can do the work when they know they can’t.”

Asked about the responses of Mr Jones and Mr de Cure, Ms van Onselen said CA ANZ’s claims were supported by a “black and white” legal reading of the new rules.

Ms van Onselen, who noted she is a lawyer, said CA ANZ had come to its conclusions after asking a senior barrister and other lawyers to examine the new rules.

New rules will stop tax agents seeking mental health help: CA ANZ


The alleged fabrications occurred on a project dubbed Project Elvis, according to the whistleblower.

Whistleblower claims he was told to fabricate data for AEC during Indigenous voice campaign



The opening night of the Democratic National Convention wasn’t just a celebration of Vice President Kamala Harris, who quickly rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden ended his campaign last month. 




Why did NACC decline to pursue the Robodebt scandal? Conflict of interests revealed


Caribbean drunken monkeys act surprisingly much like humans ZME Science

NFL Owners, Executives to Meet on Private Equity Stakes in Teams Bloomberg


Up to 85 journalists, most of them senior, have taken a voluntary redundancy from mastheads including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review in the biggest exodus of editorial talent since the company formerly known as Fairfax Media shed more than 150 journalistsin 2012.

The departures bookend a period of upheaval at Nine Entertainment during which 500 journalists at its publishing arm took industrial action over pay negotiations and the announcement of big cuts across the media business.

Senior journalists leave Sydney Morning Herald, Age and AFR in decade’s biggest talent exodus



Why organised crime puts its money on online gambling Pearls and Irritations


‘Words like Slaughter:’ A comparative study of The New York Times reporting in Ukraine and GazaMondoweiss


This Tiny Fossil Links Wine With The Death of The Dinosaurs Science Alert


A ‘middle income’ or profitability trap? Michael Robert’s Blog


A Kaleckian approach to financialization and functional income distribution: Austria and Finland in comparative perspective Institute for International Political Economy Berlin. From the abstract: “…we expect financialization to influence the aggregate wage share through three channels: (1) sectoral recomposition, (2) financial overhead costs and rentiers’ profits claims, and (3) bargaining power of trade unions and workers. We empirically analyze the long-term trends for each of the channels before and after the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession for Austria and Finland. Overall, we find evidence for all three re-distributional channels contributing to the changes in functional income distribution. The explanatory power of the individual channels, however, differs strongly due to the heterogeneity of the countries.”

“Disenshittify or Die” Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic


Public Ownership of Public Goods How Things Work