Eideard

The chief of India’s federal investigation agency says Indians have illegally deposited an estimated $500bn in overseas tax havens.

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director AP Singh said Indians were the largest depositors in foreign banks. Funds were being sent to tax havens such as Mauritius, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and the British Virgin Islands among others, he said…

Mr Singh was speaking at the opening on Monday of the first Interpol global programme on anti-corruption and asset recovery in the Indian capital, Delhi…

Mr Singh said getting information about such illegal transactions was a time-consuming and expensive process as each country where money had been sent had to be approached for help with investigations.

He said there was a lack of political will in the tax havens to part with any information because they were aware of the extent to which their economies had become “geared to this flow of illegal capitals from the poorer countries”…

In a report in November 2010 the US-based group, Global Financial Integrity…India’s underground economy accounted for 50% of the country’s gross domestic product, it said. The report said the illicit outflows of money had increased after economic reforms began in 1991.

I know it ain’t ever easy to get nations to cooperate when a significant portion of their economy is designed to aid criminal activities. But, that is exactly the context which should make penalties easy to establish in the home country.

Gee, all you need is honest politicians in your own government to pass the laws.

Italy in the winter of tracking tax evaders

Police fanned out across Milan in late January halting more than 350 vehicles, mostly luxury SUVs and Porsches.

At checkpoints, including one adjacent to the fashionable Corso Como, the police got the driver’s license and registration, which they passed on to the national tax agency. The tax authorities will use the data to check if the cars’ owners had declared enough income — and of course paid the right amount of income taxes — to justify their lifestyles.

It was at least the fifth raid targeting wealthy Italians since a Dec. 30 sweep at the posh Cortina d’Ampezzo ski resort, where 251 high-end cars were stopped, including Ferrari and Lamborghini supercars… Rome, Portofino on the Italian Riviera and Florence have also been targeted…

Italian authorities are applying to luxury-car owners the same logic they displayed more than a year ago, when tax agents started tracking down the owners of yachts berthed in Italy’s harbors to see if they were current on their tax payments.

In the raid in Cortina D’Ampezzo, tax agents found that 42 luxury car owners had declared income of less than 30,000 euros for 2010 and 2009. Another 19 luxury cars were owned by businesses which posted a loss in the previous year. The sweep in Florence discovered a builder with no tax record who was driving a Mercedes with his wife who was receiving social assistance. Tax officials also found a German owner of a BMW X5 SUV with no declared income, according to the website of the tax agency’s Florence office.

This is serious stuff for the government, which estimates that tax evasion costs the country about 120 billion euros a year in lost revenue…

The collection effort is part of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s plan to curb record borrowing costs on Italy’s 1.9 trillion-euro debt and avoid following Greece, Portugal and Ireland which all had to seek bailouts.

Demand for vehicles from the likes of Ferrari and Maserati brands and Lamborghini slumped 53 percent in January, with just 66 supercars sold, according to Anfia, the association of Italian carmakers. The new taxes and high-profile dragnets have also sent exotic-car prices down 20 percent, according to dealer association Federauto…

Still, for Ferrari, which earns higher profit margins than any other Fiat unit, it’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty of demand outside Italy for the company’s sports cars.

“Italy isn’t a concern for Ferrari as it sells its cars abroad,” Marchionne said last month in Detroit.

I wonder what people like John Boehner and Harry Reid intend to drive when they retire from Congress – and they no longer have to lie quite as much as they do now about what they really care about.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week passed up the chance to decide whether opening up a public meeting with a sectarian prayer, usually invoking the name of Jesus — a practice carried out in broad swaths of Red State America — is constitutional.

Every business day, thousands of government bodies at all levels begin sessions with prayers. Those prayers are supposed to be “non-sectarian” — they are supposed to appeal to a Supreme Being without reference to religion. But what if a prayer delivered at the start of a government meeting makes a specific reference to a particular religion, for example, using the name of Jesus?

A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative U.S. appeals courts in the country, has ruled such specific references are unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week left that ruling in place, but whether the appeals court ruling will have an effect on the government meetings across the country opened with Christian prayers remains to be seen.

The high court could always take on the dispute in some future case. But for the moment the appeals court ruling is the law in the Fourth Circuit: North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia…

The Supreme Court denied the request for review last Tuesday without comment.

And local bible-thumpers will continue to violate the law same as it ever was. You expected different?

As I am wont to say within this context, Separation of church and state – in the United States – is only observed when it comes to paying taxes.

As a result of the campaign by sportsfans.org and others – the FCC is asking for public comment over the next month on its sports blackout rule. The FCC’s rule props up the leagues’ own blackout rules by prohibiting cable and satellite carriers from carrying a game if local broadcasters are prohibited from carrying the game because of league blackout rules. Sports Fans Coalition and other groups have asked the FCC to eliminate this rule because we think the government shouldn’t be in the business of supporting counterproductive and unethical blackout policies.

SFC is currently creating a website to make it easier for you to submit comments to the FCC, but in the meantime, if you’re chomping at the bit to put in your two cents, please see below. Remember that your name and comments will be visible to the public, so please be respectful. But feel free to share the details of your own frustrations with blackouts.

To submit a comment:

1. Your message will need to be in the form of an attachment, so just open up a Word document, write your message and save it.
2. Click here to be redirected to the FCC’s electronic filing system.
3. Where it says proceeding number, enter 12-3.
4. Fill out the required information and attach the saved Word document with your message.
5. That’s it!

Need help with what to say? Feel free to copy or adapt this example for yourself:

It’s time to end to the sports blackout rule. It is an unnecessary and anti-consumer regulation that only benefits team owners. Fans and taxpayers have already heavily subsidized professional sports, so blackouts are unethical and punish fans who can’t afford the high cost of attending games or who don’t have the right TV provider. The government should not be in the business of propping up sports leagues’ counterproductive blackouts. Keep the games on the air!

Overdue. And a terrific example of citizen pressure on the government getting the beginning of a result. The rest is up to you…

The tax authorities say Italy loses an estimated $150 billion a year in undeclared revenues, while the national statistics authority places the underground economy to be about 17.5 percent of gross domestic product — the third highest in Western Europe after Malta and Greece but before Spain. Other experts place the percentage much higher.

To tackle the issue, Prime Minister Mario Monti’s new $40 billion austerity package, which received final approval on Thursday in the Senate, includes tougher measures that will allow tax officials to peer into Italians’ bank accounts to check declared income against bank deposits — not to mention yacht, car and home ownership — under a new cross-referencing initiative…

…Italy is introducing the cross-referencing initiative, dubbed the “income-o-meter,” to be put in place in the coming months. “If you declare $26,000 a year, you can’t buy a piece of real estate valued at $1.3 million,” said Attilio Befera, the director of the Agenzia delle Entrate, Italy’s internal revenue service. Discrepancies like that will now prompt an audit, Mr. Befera said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Immelt advising Obama on jobs that pay a lot less than he makes
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The 25 highest paid US chief executives earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a study has said.

The average annual remuneration of the 25 bosses was $16.7 million, the left-leaning think tank Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found. One chief executive on its list is General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, who the IPS said was paid $15.2 million in 2010 while his firm got a $3.3 billion tax refund…

Its spokesman said the study did not include significant federal income taxes paid in 2010 for previous years…

Other bosses on the IPS list are those of eBay and Boeing…

The IPS said two thirds of the 25 bosses were the heads of companies that utilised offshore subsidiaries in tax havens such as Bermuda, Singapore and Luxembourg.

IPS senior scholar and co-author of the report Chuck Collins said: “I think it’s an exposure of weakness in a company if their profitability is dependent on their accounting department and not on making better widgets.”

The think tank also found many of the firms spent more on lobbying politicians than they did on taxes.

The IPS said Boeing spent $20.8 million on lobbying, while paying only $13 million in federal income taxes.

Anyone surprised?

I know, I know. I mean surprised that there were only 25 in the study getting away with this?

Prostitutes working the streets of the old West German capital now have to buy tickets from converted roadside vending machines that once dispensed tickets to the city’s drivers. A night’s ticket will set a prostitute back £5.30, irrespective of the number of clients they have.

Like parking metres, the machines also tell users the times of day when a ticket is necessary: in this case between the hours of 8:15pm and 6am, Monday to Sunday.

Monika Frombgen, a spokeswoman for Bonn city council, said the ticket machines would bring street prostitutes into fiscal line with their peers in registered sex establishments.

“This is an act of tax fairness,” she said. “Prostitutes in fixed establishments such as brothels and sauna clubs already pay tax.” She added that with many street prostitutes foreign born previous attempts to tax them had floundered on a widespread inability to comprehend a German income tax form. The machines, Bonn hopes, will provide an easy-to-understand system of taxation…

The ticket machines come as the latest step in Bonn’s drive to increase tax revenue from prostitution as it wrestles with financial problems. Earlier this year the city introduced a “sex tax”, and it expects the levy to raise annual revenue of £265,000 for the city’s coffers…

The city has banned prostitution from areas of the city, and allocated six closed-off parking places for the use of prostitutes and their clients.

Aside from the chuckles, this is a useful exercise in thoughtful fiscal policy from a sophisticated, well-educated nation. Imagine trying to sort something like this out in the United States?

But, then, much of Western Europe also has [somewhat more] sensible policies about drugs, speeding, unemployment.

E’ già da un mese che il tema della tassazione del patrimonio della Chiesa in Italia ha l’onore della cronaca e di qualche prima pagina. Poche in verità, ma in confronto all’ omertà dei grandi giornali e dei partiti politici, direi che se ne comincia a parlare. Grande, d’altronde, è l’ignoranza circa le esenzioni di cui gode la Chiesa nelle più disparate forme e consuetudini. La maggioranza degli italiani quando si parla del tema nomina immediatamente l’8×1000. Ma lì si ferma!

I’m offering this link to a blog post by one of our regular readers – whose English is so much better than my Italian – on a topic important to many nations. That topic is the tax-free status of many religions. State religions. State religion wannabes.

GOOGLE translate helps if you don’t speak Italian.

Think these people are freer without a Federal Aviation Administration?

Thousands of employees have been furloughed and dozens of major projects put on hold after Congress failed to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Air traffic controllers will remain on the job, but the furloughs have hit many engineers, scientists, computer specialists, community planners and others. Nearly 4,000 employees in 35 states, Washington and Puerto Rico have been told to stop work, according to the FAA.

Efforts to continue funding hit a stumbling block over House Republican efforts to make it harder for airline and rail workers to unionize and over a move to cut subsidies for air service to rural airports.

Congress adjourned Friday without passing legislation, causing funding to end at midnight that night…

The FAA said contractors have been told to stop work on dozens of projects across the country, including a $43 million project in Las Vegas and a $31 million project in Oakland, California, to build air traffic control towers.

Without new legislation, the government will also not be able to collect about $200 million a week in airline taxes that normally go to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. A $2.5 billion program providing grants for airport construction projects was similarly forced to shut down.

Ideological elitists are going to have to climb down from their ivory towers sooner or later and understand that people outside of Congress need work, need jobs, need dignity and the right to organize and govern their own lives. Making collective political activity illegal does nothing for liberty. Even if it may optimize profits for corporations, enforcing limits on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans will only fill a reservoir of discontent and ill will – that will eventually spill over onto the political landscape.

American voters are too easy at forgetting who screwed them from election to election. But, it’s easier to remind people nowadays. Cripes, all you need to do is crank up a press conference filled with Republican promises of jobs and match it side-by-side with the ZERO quantity of jobs/infrastructure legislation they have offered up since the last election.

In a major crackdown on online gambling, the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office have charged the founders of the three biggest Internet poker sites with fraud, illegal gambling and laundering billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds.

The FBI said Friday it’s indicting 11 defendants — including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker — with bank fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling offenses. The feds also seized five Internet domain names used by the companies to host their poker games and issued restraining orders against 75 bank accounts in 14 countries used to process payments. The U.S. attorney’s office is also seeking $3 billion in damages. The defendants could face maximum penalties of 30 years in prison $1 million fines.

Visitors to FullTiltPoker.com and AbsolutePoker.com Saturday were met with a notice from the FBI declaring the domain names had been seized by federal authorities — along with a reminder that illegal gambling is a federal crime.

PokerStars posted a statement early Saturday through its computer software and on Twitter saying the company has had to suspend real money play to customers based in the U.S., according to the Associated Press.

“Please be assured player balances are safe. There is no cause for concern,” the statement said. “For all customers outside the U.S. it is business as usual…

The feds say the sites violate the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed in 2006. The offshore poker companies have argued they operate outside the reach of U.S. law. The U.S. government considers Internet gambling to be illegal. Still, it’s been estimated up 15 million Americans gamble up to $6 billion per year online.

Like most American morality the question comes down to money. It’s why most drugs – especially marijuana – were made illegal. And booze – for a spell. Leadership and ethics once again are missing in action from the arena of gaming and American politics.

People who want to gamble will find a way. One of the greatest temptations in archaic moralizing is the opportunity to violate a law you know is stupid.