Records showing how thoroughly the Internal Revenue Service audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure, according to a legal motion filed last week in federal court in Seattle.
For decades, the information was given at no charge to a professor at Syracuse University, Susan B. Long, who made it available on the Internet at trac.syr.edu, with tools for people to conduct their own analyses.
Among other findings, Professor Long’s information has shown that in 1999 the poor were more likely than the rich to be audited.
David Burnham, co-director with Professor Long of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects raw government data, said the withheld information made it impossible to evaluate the intensity of audits. Mr. Burnham noted that the withheld data included figures that indicated how much auditors say is owed in extra taxes, but that the tax agency lets taxpayers negotiate down.
“It is simply impossible to evaluate the I.R.S. without this data,” Mr. Burnham said, “and they know it.”
500 Year Chart of Silver
Americans Grow to Fit Their Environment
Perhaps, not all that surprising. The housing numbers, “I think” reflect low interest rates and a generally expanding econompy.
Detroit International Auto Show Coverage
There’s an extraordinary amount of coverage online. I find the styling exercises interesting – sort of a look into the soul of these companies, or, at the very least their views on what the public wants:
- Autoblog
- Fastlane
- Detroit News
- Automobile Magazine
Joe White looks at the challenges facing Ford and GM. Interestingly, Ford is showing a very large truck concept, the Super Chief that can run on traditional gas, ethanol or hydrogen.
Kinsley on the Future of Newspapers: Black and White and Dead All Over
And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.
No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn’t mean newspapers are toast. After all, they’ve got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the “Post-Intelligencer” more than something called “Yahoo” or “Google,” don’t you? No, seriously, don’t you? Okay, how old did you say you are?
Video DRM Morass (Digital Restrictions Management)
Tristan Louis nicely summarizes the morass that is proprietary video distribution online.
Genetic Testing for the Rest of Us – over the Internet
DNA Direct offers genetics tests that can reveal a predisposition to a half dozen diseases or conditions, among them breast and ovarian cancer, cystic fibrosis, clotting disorders and infertility. Phelan obtained her chromosomal analysis the same way any client could. She spoke with the company’s genetic counselor and then went for a blood test. The counselor reviewed the findings to help her interpret what they meant. In Phelan’s case, the results provided a surprise — what looked like partial Turner’s syndrome. It was a possible clue to her past struggle with infertility, although she’s never had any other symptoms.
“When I realized this I was thrilled,” she said. “There may have been an underlying genetic factor. … I thought, wow, women could go through this and have this help. It can work backward and help diagnose the past.”
Your Phone Records Are For Sale
Some online services might be skirting the law to obtain these phone lists, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use.
In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers’ phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer.
And some online brokers have used deception to get the lists from the phone companies, he said.
Congress Hands Caught in the Cookie Jar
Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache:
All House members who use cookies either acknowledge it or have privacy policies that are silent on the topic. Of the 23 senators who pledged not to employ cookies but do anyway, 18 are Republicans and five are Democrats.
“It shows their lack of understanding of technology,” said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. “It’s willful ignorance. They’re complete hypocrites. How can they accuse companies of poor data management when they’re not doing it on their own Web sites?”
No rule prohibits the use of Web monitoring techniques by Congress. But such a restriction does apply to executive branch agencies. The Pentagon and others scrambled this week to eliminate so-called Web bugs and cookies after inquiries from CNET News.com.
Telco Double Dipping
Today’s Wall Street Journal had a cover story on the Telco’s desire to charge consumers extra to download video from Google or a song from iTunes.
Sure, the Telcos might be able to get more money from people who need super fast, six sigma reliability Internet connections. There has always been a business model around super high performance networks.
But this is really just marketing spin. What’s really going on is the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and the other Telcos are looking at their margins going down month after month while the service providers like Apple and Google, who deliver their services to consumers over the Telco’s networks, are watching their margins go up and up.
Jarvis calls the Telcos "robber barons" and Om Malik calls this hairbrained scheme a "chimera". I had to look that up. Om’s either calling this money grubbing scheme a "fire breathing she monster" which sounds about right, or a "creation of the imagination" which it clearly is.