Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Tax preparer gets 42 months prison for PPP fraud; got $3.6 million

 

Million-dollar crime trail uncovered after woman caught at Perth airport with $190k cash stash

Bureau Report Bureau Report
Image Source: ABF
Image Source: ABF
A routine screening at Perth International Airport has blown the lid off a suspected multi-million-dollar money laundering operation, with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) now restraining about $7 million in assets believed to be proceeds of crime.
The extraordinary investigation began in October 2023 when airport security flagged irregularities in the luggage of a 65-year-old woman preparing to depart Australia. After being referred to the Australian Border Force (ABF), a search uncovered bundles of cash – $191,850 in Australian dollars, along with a small amount of Euros and other currency – concealed in her clothing and suitcase.
The AFP was called in and seized the cash, which the woman allegedly failed to declare. She claimed the money was savings, partly gifted by her family, including her son and daughter-in-law.


Wired: Social media influencer teaches Nigerian Yahoo boys their trade
 
Part eight on Fraud gangs:  Nigeria
Nigerian scammers seem responsible for a larger share of consumer fraud than any other group.    Nigeria is a former British colony, fairly well educated, and largely English-speaking.  It has a large population of 227 million and thus is quite a bit larger than Russia with 143 million.  Despite huge oil reserves, many people are relatively poor.  Thus there has been a massive Nigerian Diaspora to other countries around the world; and very large numbers have emigrated to the US, Canada, Europe, Ireland, and Asia. The main law enforcement body in Nigerian, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (the EFCC) has told me that they believe there may be 250,000 Nigerians living in just mainland China.
     Scammers from Nigeria, often known as Yahoo boys, are the primary operators of romance scams, but also operate a large number of other frauds, such as Sextortion scams targeting teenage boys, business email compromise fraud,  inheritance and lottery fraud, and the theft of government benefits, such as unemployment and PPP fraud.
     Often groups operate several different frauds simultaneously, working with partners around the world.  Some frauds interlink, such as using romance scam victims as mules to launder money for BEC and other frauds.   These frauds also have a strong fraud support network of related enterprises that they employ to provide internet support, move money, make fake web sites and passports, etc.  These are just facts. There is no more reason to believe that all, or even most,  Nigerians are scammers than it would be to believe all Italians are part of the Mafia. 
Next week: The Black Axe
  
Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraud and crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldHumor FTC and CFPBBenefit Theft Scam CompoundsBitcoin and Crypto FraudRansomware and data breachesATM Skimming                                                         Romance Fraud and Sextortion 
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Are consultants really just a waste of human skin?

The public sector unit saving Canberra millions on private consultants

A strategy of targeting “rare but repeatable” work across the public sector has helped the federal government’s fledgling in-house consulting service displace almost $7 million of work that would have been done by external advisors, says chief consulting officer Andrew Nipe.
Australian Government Consulting (AGC), which has 32 staff, has now completed almost 30 projects across 13 federal agencies. The unit, which has been running for almost two years, was established as part of a Labor government push to build up skills within the public service and reduce the unnecessary use of external advisors.
Nipe said the unit, which is also helping public servants become better at buying professional services, could become an established part of the bureaucracy in the same way as the more than century-old Australian Government Solicitor.
“The comparison institution that I look to quite a lot is AGS, the Australian Government Solicitor, because that is a really good example of where departments have the capability. They’ll have in-house legal advice; they’ll also go to AGS, but a lot of the time they’ll [also] go to the market [for legal advice],” he told The Australian Financial Review Government Services Summit on Tuesday afternoon.
Having an in-house consulting unit – a move being emulated by the Queensland and NSW governments and the Department of Defence – is part of the federal Labor government’s push to ensure that external advisers are used more effectively. Labor accused the previous Coalition government of hollowing out skills within the public sector through the use of a cap on public servant numbers. The Coalition said the cap helped keep the cost of the public service in check.
The government’s push to rebuild the public sector has led to the rehiring of thousands of public servants, cuts to the value of contracts inked with major firms such as KPMG and EY, and the effective banning of external advisers doing public service core work.
The federal government has signed about $470 million worth of contracts in 2024-25 with Deloitte, EY and KPMG, down from a peak of $1.4 billion in 2021-22. PwC has exited the public sector advisory market following its tax leaks scandal.

‘Rare but repeatable’ work

Nipe said his unit was particularly interested in “rare but repeatable” work such as organisational design, because it allows his team to spot patterns and “share capability and expertise and insights” across departments and agencies.
“That means that it’s a problem that the agency is working on rarely, but is repeated frequently across the public service,” he said. “And the reason that those two things are important is, if it’s ‘rare rare’, then we’d probably suggest you go to market. There’ll be a private sector consulting firm, there’ll be an expertise in Australia or around the world that is able to be expert at that thing because you’re doing it rarely and the public service is doing it rarely.”
He said the unit measures its effectiveness using a range of financial and non-financial metrics.
“So in terms of how we measure our impact, the first one would be on displaced spend … and that’s looking at what we estimate it would have cost if you’d gone to market,” Nipe told the summit. “We’re [also] increasingly measuring cost recovery. We want to get to cost neutral, so that we’re essentially self-sufficient.”
He said every client so far has said AGC services are “at least as good” as the private sector and “about 75 per cent say we’re better than the private sector”.
Nipe said the positive response is due the team being public servants themselves, which means “what we’re solving for is public value exclusively”.
Edmund Tadros leads our coverage of the professional services sector. He is based in our Sydney newsroom. Email Edmund at edmundtadros@afr.com.au


Are consultants really just a waste of human skin? 

Some interesting findings from Belgium (really)

Robin Wigglesworth
Published 29 July 2025

Journalists, telemarketers, used car salespeople and human traffickers can console themselves that there is one profession even more widely detested: consultants.

After all, most people have had at least one direct or indirect interaction with the professional class of pseudo-managers churned out by business schools and hoovered up by the likes of McKinsey, Deloitte or BCG — and most of them unpleasant, frustrating, or simply baffling. 
Sure, sometimes they get involved in high-profile projects like ambitious mass relocation programmes or daring pharmaceutical sales initiatives. But most of the work seems to revolve around 30-something MBAs too dim for private equity being parachuted into multinational businesses or sprawling government departments to tell the bosses what they should already know. And that seems to be a generous interpretation.
Nonetheless, it is estimated that consulting globally generated revenues of about $400bn last year. How can something so widely mocked as an utter waste of time and money be so profitable?
As it happens, three academics have recently had a stab at measuring whether consultants actually add any value, which the National Bureau of Economic Research published this month. And lo:
We document that consulting take-up is concentrated among large, high-labor-productivity firms. For TFP and profitability, we find a U-shaped pattern: both high and low performers hire consultants. New clients spend on average 3% of payroll on consulting, typically in episodic engagements lasting less than one year. Using difference-indifferences designs exploiting these sharp consulting events, we find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue. Average wages rise by 2.7% with no decline in labor’s share of value added, suggesting productivity gains do not come at workers’ expense through rent-shifting. We do observe organizational restructuring with small increases in dismissal rates, and higher services procurement but reduced labor outsourcing. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals larger productivity gains for initially less productive firms, suggesting improvements in allocative efficiency.
How did the three authors — Gert Bijnens of the National Bank of Belgium, Princeton University’s Simon Jäger and Benjamin Schoefer of Berkeley — calculate this? Through a pretty nifty dataset. 
They combined two decades worth of granular value-added-tax data from the Belgian tax authorities, confidential and anonymised firm-level data provided by the National Bank of Belgium, and public financial accounts to create what they reckon is “the first comprehensive dataset of major strategy consulting relationships in an entire economy”.
The tendency of consulting work to be episodic — typically lasting for about a year and a half — allowed them to examine the subsequent impact on employment, wages and productivity. To focus squarely on classic consulting, Bijnens, Jäger and Schoefer excluded the “Big Four” accountancies Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC, where most of the revenues come from audits and tax advice. 
Lots of fancy equations later, and they found that:
. . . consulting events are associated with labor productivity growth, appearing to stem from mild reductions in employment against mildly growing revenue and value added. We find positive effects on average wages, no effect on the labor share, and a reduction in a proxy for outsourcing and if anything a shift towards managerial labor. 
We find a mild increase in dismissals, against an overall modest or insignificant employment effect, consistent with some restructuring activities that overall increase productivity. Hence, overall, our findings point towards consulting being associated with positive or neutral outcomes for firms and, arguably and in a more complex picture, workers. 
On average, our results are more in line with a productivity-enhancing view of consulting and reject a view of consulting as a rent-shifting institution. We do not find strong profitability effects — perhaps in part because the moderate productivity effects are “eaten up” by wage boosts (although we cannot rule out compositional effects driving both margins).
This probably won’t assuage the baying hordes of management consultant critics, nor is the report glowing enough to constitute a full-throated endorsement of the consulting business model. But it was interesting enough to warrant a midweek post in late July.
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ANZ’s Nuno Matos reads riot act to staff, says culture must ‘pivot’

ANZ’s Nuno Matos reads riot act to staff, says culture must ‘pivot’


 Labour’s tax raids on wealthy ‘already backfiring’ as Reeves prepares to come back for more: CGT revenue drops as Goldman Sachs boss warns London’s status as global financial hub is at riskDaily Mail




These 7 Free Tools Can Help You Avoid Malicious Links to Stay Safe

How to Geek: “How safe is this URL? That’s the question you should be asking before clicking on random links. 

A friend of mine on X shared how she learned this lesson the hard way after getting locked out of her Snapchat account. Don’t make the same mistake. Here are seven of the best free URL checkers that’ll help protect you from malicious links online. 

Despite its name, the VirusTotal Link Checker is one of the best URL checkers I use to vet suspicious links in my texts, inbox, and social media DMs. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of URL scanners. It lets you scan and analyze links, files, and even search file hashes, among other things…”

 Simple and easy to use, it has separate tabs for scanning links, files, and searching for different threats. It uses AI technology to scan links and reference current databases of known threats.


Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies top ranks

Government Executive: “President Trump created another new category of federal employee on Thursday evening, issuing an executive order to expand the number of political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation and will serve in policy-making or policy-advocating roles. 


While presidents can already tap an uncapped number of appointees to serve in Schedule C positions, Trump noted those individuals serve in more narrow confidential or policy-determining roles. 

The new positions will therefore fill a gap that currently exists in federal appointments, the White House said.  The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. 

Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason. “President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.  

Appointments to Schedule G positions are expected to lapse at the end of a presidential administration. The roles are particularly aimed at the Veterans Affairs Department and will go to applicants who prove to be suitable supporters of the president’s agenda. Agencies cannot take into consideration an applicant’s political affiliation. 

“Schedule G employees will be hired to help faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said. Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said Schedule G would only make an “overly complicated system more confusing” and the Trump administration failed to engaged with experts, who would have said the new appointment category was creating redundancies that disempower the apolitical civil service. 

Adding more political appointees will mean that “effective, stable service delivery will suffer,” he said.  “This new Schedule G classification is another misguided attempt by the administration to further politicize the federal workforce,” Stier said.

 “A president already has the power to make more than 4,000 political appointments, far more than other democracies, most of which number their political appointees in the 10s.” The White House boasted that Schedule G’s creation is just the latest effort to deliver on Trump’s “promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption.”



A Nation in Fragments

The INK – Anand Giridharadas: “Six months. It may not be long enough to grow a baby or build a house or land a liquor license, but it is enough time to break a country. 


To disembowel its institutions, to lay waste to its ideals, to darken its spirit, to make it crueler and harder and more fearful than before. As Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches the half-year mark, I wanted to consider this turbulent period as a whole, instead of in the daily, death-by-a-182-cuts way I had been. So I spent a few days looking at every New York Times front page since January 20, noting down phrases, fragments, lines that struck me — some about the chaos in Washington, others about the broader world. I ended up with nearly 800 shards of news.  

That was my first round of this reliving. But I wanted to remix and reorder these shards in a way that better captured what it has been like to live through this period. And chronology, here, was not my friend. It missed the disorienting, destabilizing, whiplash feeling of this time. It kept the reader from making certain non-obvious but important connections. 


From the brilliant book Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti, a different possibility came to me: re-array the fragments alphabetically. Remove the linearity and the false sense of order it lends. Allow new patterns, new themes, to grow visible, and the frazzled randomness of it all, too. After a good deal of paring down, the result is now below. 


It is very much in keeping with the mission and work of The Ink over these chaotic months: to explore not just what is happening but how people experience it; to understand the phenomena driving modern American life in psychological as much as political terms; to pay attention to language and its uses by power. This is a post to be read when you have some time on your hands. 

At first, you may not feel drawn to the idea of reliving these six months. But I would encourage you to think again. Presented this way, I think, the half-year gone by, the half-year we have shuddered through and fought through and endured through, becomes a document of who we have been…”

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The conman, the jet and the Australian developer who helped bring him down

The Tax Office denies it has become harder for taxpayers to have penalties waived and revealed that the agency approves requests for clemency “in part or in full more often than we do not”.

The denial follows comments by tax lawyer Tania Waterhouse that the waivers of tax penalties are more difficult to obtain than in the past and are now mainly granted in cases involving natural disaster or serious illness.

Majority of requests to waiver tax penalties are approved: ATO



 ‘Work until we die?’ Independent readers outraged over retirement age review The Independent


Western Sydney Airport official who sought $200k kickback narrowly avoids jail time 





Davis Polk Axes Tax Associate Who Published Op-Eds Criticizing Trump: ‘Was He Heroic, Naive Or Full Of Himself?’


Trump administration ordered review of SpaceX government contracts following Trump-Musk fallout: Report The Economic Times


How Elon Musk Created a Nightmare for Donald Trump Gizmodo


Elon Musk moves xAI, Grok onto Palantir turf The Street


Trump EPA will propose repealing finding that climate change endangers public health The Hill

 

Trump’s AI Action Plan Includes ‘Zombie’ Moratorium on State Regulations Common Dreams

 

Five Interesting Things about the White House AI Action Plan Interconnected

 

Trump Launched Nearly as Many Airstrikes in Five Months as Biden Did in Four Years Antiwar


Those old service sector jobs


Does aging accelerate at age fifty?


 Queen Anne statue still regulating betting in DC


Defending social media


What Dan read, NYT coverage here


Bunch of complicated prediction market results about central bank independence.

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Monday, July 28, 2025

Trump v Murdoch


"For if the bomb that drops on you Gets your friends and neighbors too, There'll be nobody left behind to grieve."

Tom Lehrer


Tom Lehrer, master satirist of Cold War era, dies at 97 In song, he brilliantly skewered clichés about romance, patriotism and small-town life


Trump stumbled on Epstein, and Rupert Murdoch has pounced


Trump asks for swift deposition of Murdoch in Epstein defamation case


Repenting catholic? Murdoch v Trump: why the flawed media titan could be the final protector of press freedom


Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity”: We have more to fear from stupid people than evil ones Big Think

20-Million-Year-Old Rhino Fossil Rewrites Evolutionary History SciTech Daily


An electric scooter that accelerates faster than a Tesla Model 3? No thanks! The Verge


For privacy and security, think twice before granting AI access to your personal dataTechCrunch


MasterChefs:








USDA again asks for Kansans’ personal data, as lawsuit seeks privacy protections Kansas Reflector


Elon Musk’s latest blending of business interests puts his Grok AI chatbot in Teslas—and raises questions around data and privacy Fortune


Christina Pagel – “With the help of amazing volunteers, I’ve converted my Trump action tracker spreadsheet into an easy to use website – now up to 740 actions and counting. Today I’m launching TrumpActionTracker.info – a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). Logging actions of the Trump administration across five broad domains of authoritarianism.

 I’ve been doing my best to track actions of the Trump administration that are authoritarian-like since the start of his second term in January 2025. In February 2025, I introduced five broad domains of authoritarianism that covered the recorded actions:

  • Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government
  • Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption
  • Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information
  • Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education
  • Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization; Nationalism

I then mapped the actions onto a Venn Diagram. Since then, I have continued writing about further actions, and groups of actions since, such as attacks on science, universities, democracy, and suppressing dissent. 


However, as the number of authoritarian-like actions has continued to grow (now at more than 740), I wanted to create a web resource that lets anyone explore the actions I am logging. With the help of two amazing volunteers Sandy Laping (who helps me find actions to log) and Pete Duncanson (who built the website), this is now live at trumpactiontracker.info”


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