Wednesday, March 07, 2018

Tax and Cyber Fears

“I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me”.
~ Jay London 



NSW's $2 billion new trains are too wide to get through tunnels



Record numbers of Americans living in Australia are considering a divorce from Uncle Sam because of US taxes on their Australian income, says a tax lawyer who advises Americans living abroad 




2020 Vision - Tax Office looks for new eastern seaboard digs


The dark reasons so many rich people are miserable human beings Moneyish (DL). Original. Yves points out that the study should adjust for local cost of living.
They asked for help with a broken furnace. A week later, a neighbor alerted police.Wichita Eagle

The principles of taxation are complex: in 2009 it took five volumes of the Henry Review to explain tax reform. But on ABC Radio National The Economists website is a lively 28 minute discussion “The joy of tax” between three experts, telling you (almost) everything you need to know about tax and tax reform.

Last month Australia slipped further down the rankings in the international corruption index. Among a wide range of factors cited by Transparency International was Australia’s “inappropriate industry lobbying in large-scale projects such as mining”, as well as “revolving doors and a culture of mateship” More than 180 individuals have moved between senior public service roles and the fossil fuel industry in Australia over the past decade - providing a golden escalator for former senior politicians.  Revealed: the extent of job-swapping between ... - The Conversation

 




SCOTT BURCHILL. Class power in the US.

All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind (Adam Smith).
Class is a Communist concept. It groups people together and sets them against each other (Margaret Thatcher).
[Current opposition to free trade in the United States is] heavily influenced by perceptions that voters themselves now view trade issues in terms of a domestic class struggle, not as promoting exports and global integration (David Hale, economist).Continue reading 



IAN McAULEY. Tax reform, not tax cuts



From an unlikely source comes a message that Australia doesn’t need “smaller government”. Rather we need tax reform to ensure we can build a social safety net, and fund world-class health and education. Continue reading 


Housing risks 'catastrophic': Grattan Institute
 
HOW LENDERS ARE TURNING LOW-LEVEL COURTS INTO DICKENSIAN “DEBT COLLECTION MILLS” Intercept

  1. The Tax Lifecycle Of A Single Member LLC, by F. Philip Manns Jr. (Liberty) & Timothy M. Todd (Liberty)




The nation's top lawyers recently battled artificial intelligence in a competition to interpret contracts — and they lost.

new study, conducted by legal AI platform LawGeex in consultation with law professors from Stanford University, Duke University School of Law, and University of Southern California, pitted twenty experienced lawyers against an AI trained to evaluate legal contracts. Competitors were given four hours to review five non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and identify 30 legal issues, including arbitration, confidentiality of relationship, and indemnification. They were scored by how accurately they identified each issue.

Unfortunately for humanity, we lost the competition — badly.

The human lawyers achieved, on average, an 85 percent accuracy rate, while the AI achieved 95 percent accuracy. The AI also completed the task in 26 minutes, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average. The AI also achieved 100 percent accuracy in one contract, on which the highest-scoring human lawyer scored only 97 percent. In short, the human lawyers were trounced.


DyrengScott Dyreng (Duke) Tax Avoidance and Tax Incidence (with Martin Jacob (WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Managemen), Xu Jiang(Duke) & Maximilian A. Müller (WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Managemen)) at Duke today as part of its Tax Policy Workshop Series hosted by Lawrence Zelenak:

We examine corporate tax avoidance in a setting where shareholders might not bear the entire economic burden of the corporate tax because the firm’s market power allows it to pass the burden to workers or consumers. Depending on the model conditions, tax avoidance increases or decreases in market power. Using empirical analyses, we find that high market power firms avoid less tax than low market power firms. We also find empirical support for the model conditions underlying this result.






Tsilly Dagan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel),International Tax Policy: Between Competition and Cooperation (Cambridge University Press 2017)

New York Times, Spreadsheets at Dawn: The New Tax Battle Is All About Data:

The new Republican tax cut is providing a powerful weapon for the law’s supporters and detractors, as well as investors and analysts, who are mining data on how companies are spending their windfalls in a battle to sway the behavior of voters and executives alike.

In the two months since President Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill into law, a vast arsenal of spreadsheets has begun to capture, in real time, the effect of the tax cut as it works its way through corporate balance sheets. Traders are compiling data to find value in a volatile stock market. Advocates of corporate responsibility are hoping to shame companies into passing more of their savings on to employees or charities. Partisans are using it to sway public opinion.

None of the data, as of yet, yield anywhere close to a full picture of how the tax cuts are flowing through corporate boardrooms and into the American economy. But that has not stopped politicians and organizations from using it to advance their goals.
Wall Street Journal, Boom in Share Buybacks Renews Question of Who Wins From Tax Cuts


Olson (2018)Nina Olson (National Taxpayer Advocate) presents The State of the IRS at Minnesota today as part of its Perspectives on Taxation Lecture Series hosted by Kristin Hickman:

Drawing from her 2017 Annual Report to Congress, Ms. Olson will talk about problems facing the IRS and the implications for tax compliance and enforcement, including:

  • IRS funding and personnel cuts
  • Declining audit rates
  • Flawed implementation of congressional mandates requiring the use of private debt collectors and the denial of passports to certain U.S. citizens with substantial tax debts


Digital:
Automated phishing, or creating fake emails, websites, and links to steal information.
Faster hacking, through the automated discovery of vulnerabilities in software.
Fooling AI systems, by taking advantage of the flaws in how AI sees the world.
Physical:
Automating terrorism, by using commercial drones or autonomous vehicles as weapons.
Robot swarms, enabled by many autonomous robots trying to achieve the same goal.
Remote attacks, since autonomous robots wouldn’t need to be controlled within any set distance.
Political:
Propaganda, through easily-generated fake images and video.
Automatic dissent removal, by automatically finding and removing text or images.
Personalized persuasion, taking advantage of publicly-available information to target someone’s opinions.

The fact that the T-800 isn’t listed might be taken as evidence that this report was generated by a hostile AI

Should we forget about the 'right to be forgotten'?

 

Warren Buffett Admits Whole Trickle-Down Thing Basically a Lie

 

Phishing Schemes Lead the IRS Dirty Dozen List of Tax Scams  ...