Tag: Finances

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Quotations

2014.3.24

The tax refund has become a big part of the income stream for many low-income Canadians. Many tax credits are distributed through the tax system. And it’s the least well-off who are eligible for a lot of those credits.

Low-income Canadians can get their tax returns prepared for free at the many free income tax clinics set up across the country during tax season. But because the clinics can’t give instant refunds, it can be a tough sell to have people wait a couple of weeks to get all their money.

“We try to tell them that they don’t need to pay $40 or $50 to get their taxes prepared, they can get it done here for free,” says Viji Naguleswaran, a community financial worker at St. Christopher House, which caters to lower-income residents in Toronto.

Still, it often comes down to personal circumstances. Are these people willing to give up some of that precious refund to get their hands on money now?

“The issue is cash flow,” says Rick Eagan, community development co-ordinator at St. Christopher House. “When you’re desperate, 15 days can make a big difference.”

Tom McFeat, “Are instant tax refunds worth the cost?”
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Queen’s Park backs slowly away from transit-dedicated tax hikes

Toronto desperately needs serious leadership on the transit file, and soon: the condo boom is going to bring even more cars on the streets, and that’s going to aggravate already horrible congestion. If Toronto wants to state that it’s a world city then it needs to have the services you’d expect of such a city. And decent public transit is high on the ‘expected services’ list.

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2013.5.21

There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah.

One potentially good thing out of all this, Tim Cook will address it directly tomorrow in front of the Senate:

Mr. Cook is expected to emphasize that Apple is most likely “the largest corporate income tax payer in the U.S., having paid nearly $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury” in the last fiscal year. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Mr. Cook is expected to testify.

He is expected to seek to rebut the Congressional findings by arguing that some of Apple’s largest subsidiaries do not reduce Apple’s tax liability, and to argue in support of a sweeping overhaul of the United States corporate tax code – in particular, lowering rates on companies moving foreign overseas earnings back to the United States. Apple currently assigns more than $100 billion to offshore subsidiaries.

I figured this would lead to a change in tax policy. Now I’m sure of it.

(via parislemon)

This story, the day before Cook testifies to the Senate, is probably the worst thing Apple PR could have dreamed of. I wouldn’t want to be in Cook’s shoes tomorrow though, by the same token, if I were an American taxpayer I’d be pissed as all hell about Apple’s actions regardless of the legality of those actions.

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Yale Suing Former Students Shows Crisis in Loans to Poor

infoneer-pulse:

infoneer-pulse:

Needy U.S. borrowers are defaulting on almost $1 billion in federal student loans earmarked for the poor, leaving schools such as Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania with little choice except to sue their graduates.

The record defaults on federal Perkins loans may jeopardize the prospects of current students since they are part of a revolving fund that colleges give to students who show extraordinary financial hardship.

Yale, Penn and George Washington University have all sued former students over nonpayment, court records show. While no one tracks the number of lawsuits, students defaulted on $964 million in Perkins loans in the year ended June 2011, 20 percent more than five years earlier, government data show. Unlike most student loans — distributed and collected by the federal government — Perkins loans are administered by colleges, which use repayment money to lend to other poor students.

» via Bloomberg

The default situation is only going to get worse and worse, especially for those that tried to hide from the US recession by staying in school and taking on educational debt.

Yale Suing Former Students Shows Crisis in Loans to Poor

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Links Writing

Banking Trojan Ships With Its Own Certificate

This is all kinds of badness, and speaks to malware vendors becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they are targeting low hanging fruit (i.e. random users). In essence, the attack involved getting a certificate issued and then using it to create valid digital signatures for .pdf invoice documents. Once individuals opened the invoices the malware associated with the .pdf would burrow into the OS and act as a key logger that targeted banking information.

Unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen a media article discuss the mediocre effectiveness of revoking the certificate used to sign the .pdf. The OCSP protocol is incredibly susceptible to being defeated, especially if malware already resides on the target’s computer or a point in between the target and the revocation server is controlled by the attacker (possible by setting a compromised computer to proxy traffic to a host controlled by the attacker). So, while while the cert has been revoked, this actions does not necessarily stop the malware from functioning, but just reduces the prospective attack surface. Moreover, if browser/operating system CA stores are not updated – again, possible if the attacker already controls the host – then the same attacker can convince the browser or OS to continue trusting an expired certificate.

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Links Writing

The Financial Liability Game

Ars Technica has reported that a German court has found a victim of a phishing attack liable for successfully being phished. The finding is, at least in part, based on the bank’s position that they had previously warned customers about phishing attacks.

The court’s placement of liability is significant for a variety of reasons. Of course it’s important that the individual was victimized. The liability placement also defers expenses (likely through insurance) that the bank would have to assume were they at least partially liable for the customers’ actions. This said, we can understand (and perhaps disagree…) that, from a liberal position, individual citizens are responsible for their actions.

What is most significant are the consequences of placing liability on the individual. Specifically, it reduces the incentive that banks have to exercise their influence to address phishing. I’m not suggesting that the banks could hope to eliminate phishing by waving a gold-plated wand, but they are financially in a position to influence change and act on a global scale. Individuals – save for the ultra-rich – lack this degree of influence and power. While banks will be motivated to protect customers – and, more importantly, their customers’ money – if banks were found even partially liable for successful phishing attacks they would be significantly more motivated to remedy these attacks.