Book cooking for fun and profit.

Companies are required to publish periodically their profits or losses.  Computation of profit can be pretty slippery.  In principle, profit is gross sales less legitimate expenses.  Legitimate expenses can vary a lot.  When doing the books, any clever accountant can find various ways to make profit come out higher or lower.  When doing the books to show to the taxman, the accountants work real hard to make profit as low as possible, since the company is taxed on profit.  When doing the books to show Wall St investors and sell the company's stock, the same accountants work real hard to make the profit higher. 
  This is natural, not good, but natural. 
  But, in the United States, we allow companies to keep two sets of books, one to show the taxman, another to show to stock buyers.
   This should not be.  We should insist that companies keep one set of books, and the profit they brag about to investors is the profit upon which they pay taxes.  In fact, the IRS could do investors a favor by merely publishing all the company tax returns.  They are public companies after all, and so their tax returns are public information. 

Electronic is insecure

We had the Target Stores hack a couple of years ago.  We had the Bradley Manning hack of the Army and State Dept also a couple of years ago. We had the Edmund Snowdow hack of CIA.   We had the Office of Personnel Management hack last month.  We have the IRS hack this week.   We have the Ashley Madison hack this week.  The lesson to me is that electronic data bases are insecure.  Either a hacker coming in over the net, or a disloyal employee, and everything fits into a thumbdrive and and gets posted on the net. 
   Thanks Obama for ordering my medical records made electronic.  I'm sure they will be hacked in a year or two.  If they haven't already been. 
   As for email, that's so insecure that classified matter should never be emailed.  For that matter, high government officials (like Hillary) should never use email.  Every intelligence agency in the world wants to know what the Americans are thinking about, planning, doing.  Take a clue from Osama bin Laden who gave up on phones and high tech and ran his operations by couriered messages, which is what kept him alive for so many years. 

Shepherd Smith was trashing XP yesterday

Fox News commentator Shepherd Smith said that use of the old Windows XP operating system by the IRS led to the recent break in and identity theft on millions of taxpayers.
   I don't agree.  Windows XP is test tested, and Microsoft has been patching it for some12-15 years.  That's enough patches to plug many holes.  The newer Windows are fatter, slower, and flakier than well proven XP. 
   The real problem at IRS is the use of Windows in any form.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, full of holes that let hostiles in, and it's so big that no one understands it.  The IRS ought to be running some form of Unix  (Linux is a good one) which is infinitely more secure than any flavor of Windows. 

We need some scalps

Great Depression 2.0 started six years ago.  I know there was some malfeasance, skullduggery, and just plain stupidity in the big banks.  That crashed the world economy and threw millions out of work. But nobody has gone on trial let alone gone to jail. 
The IRS scandal.  Lois Lerner got retired, she keeps her pension.  Nobody else has been prosecuted or gone to jail.
The VA scandal.  The head of VA retired.  Nobody else has even got their name in the papers, let alone prosecuted or jailed. 
   I say Obama is going easy on this slime.  The banks, the IRS and the VA would work a lot better after jailing their top three levels of management.
   Even GM canned 8 people over the ignition switch disaster.  Are we saying that GM is more hard core than DOJ?

Who's in charge here?

This morning the TV news announced that the IRS would be publishing new rules for non profit organizations, such as Tea Parties. 
   Where does a bunch of pure democratic civil servants get the right to set that kind of policy?  By rights, Congress should pass a law.  In real life, Congress is so split, and so partisan that it is incapable of passing anything.
   Especially on something like this.  First Amendment freedom of speech and press, means organizations can say and publish anything they like.  IRS  and FEC want to change that rule, into "You cannot say anything political, any time.  This led to the famous Heller decision, the Supreme court ruled that corporations and labor unions could politick as much as they like. 
  Anyhow the IRS wants to make a rule, defining just about everything as political activity and therefore forbidden to nearly every organization in the country.  We are talking about Tea Parties, Sierra Club, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, NRA, NMRA, Elks, Chamber of Commerce,  Shriners, Republican Party, Democratic Party, Consumers Union, Campfire Girls, Masons, VFW, churches, AMA, ABA, SAE, Salvation Army, USO and on and on.
   These "non governmental organizations" do immense amounts of charitable work  They bring Americans together, they set up civic events, and they form the civic glue that holds the country together.  And, they lobby for their political interests.  Wise Congressmen listen to them, laws they support get passed, laws they oppose don't pass.  Much of the work of democracy is guided by these non governmental organizations. 
  And now the IRS is trying to take them all over. 

Actually, I'm looking for scalps

Talking head on Meet the Press this morning speaking of the IRS investigation said "It depends upon whether you are looking for facts or looking for scandals."  Well guy.  I'm not looking for either, I'm looking for scalps.  I want the people who did it fired and prosecuted.  The two resignations so far, old turkeys within weeks of retirement, don't impress me.  There is a chain of command, an organization chart, that  shows who those clerks in Cinncinnati reported to,  and show who their first level supervisor reported to, and who their second level supervisor reported to, going right on up to to top.  Every one in that chain of command ought to be fired.  Either they knew about it and should be fired for ordering it or ignoring it.  The ones that claim they don't know anything about it should be fired for incompetence, they should have known what was going on in their own organization. 
    About 20 to 30 firings will throw a scare into the rest of the IRS bureaucrats that might keep 'em straight, for just a little while.