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Why IRS customer service is
awful (and may get worse) - (www.cnbc.com)
If you have a question about
your taxes, here's a tip: Be prepared to be very patient. The Internal
Revenue Service answered a smaller share of taxpayer calls and
kept taxpayers on hold longer last year than in other recent years, a new
report finds. What's more, budget cuts could make it hard for taxpayers to get
help this year as well. The IRS could answer only 61 percent of the calls it
received from taxpayers during the 2013 fiscal year, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina
E. Olson said in a report released to Congress on Jan. 9. That
means that the rest of the calls—about 20 million—just didn't get through, the
independent taxpayer advocate said. Taxpayers who got help had to wait a
long time for it. The taxpayer advocate said callers who got through were on
hold for an average of nearly 18 minutes before talking to a customer service
representative during the 2013 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.
Four
Blunt Points About UNC, College Sports, and Academic Corruption - (www.businessweek.com) Top university administrators have refused to
acknowledge that this corruption resulted from a campaign to keep football and
basketball players academically eligible to play. Instead, administrators have
implied that the phony classes and grades were the work of one rogue department
chairman, who in December was criminally indicted for defrauding the
university. UNC’s resistance to connecting the dots between its powerful
Athletic Department and the counterfeit classes defies logic and reveals, at a
minimum, willful blindness. The pending prosecution of longtime African and
Afro-American Studies professor Julius Nyang’oro—and the prospect that, in
pursuit of leniency, the former department chairman will explain who actually
initiated and knew about the bogus classes—may finally force UNC leaders to
face reality. Let’s hope so. The NCAA, for its part, has been equally lax in
accepting the school’s implausible contention that there was no connection
between sports and academic fraud.
Thai
government considers state of emergency after weekend violence - (www.reuters.com) Thai authorities are "very seriously"
considering a state of emergency after a weekend of violence in the capital
where protesters have been trying for more than two months to bring down the
government, the security chief said on Monday. The violence is the latest
episode in an eight-year conflict that pits Bangkok's middle class and royalist
establishment against poorer, mainly rural supporters of Prime Minister
Yingluck Shinawatra and her brother, ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled
by the military in 2006. "We're prepared to use the emergency decree ...
Everyone involved including the police, the military and the government is
considering this option very seriously, but has not yet come to an
agreement," National Security Council chief Paradorn Pattantabutr told
Reuters after meeting Yingluck.
Spain’s
Worst Year for Work Leaves Rajoy Counting Cost of Slump - (www.bloomberg.com) Spanish Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoycan count the social cost of the economy’s slump when data this
week show how 2013 was probably the worst year for work in its democratic
history. Economists predict the unemployment
rate in Spain, home to almost a third of the euro region’s
jobless, stayed above 25 percent for the sixth quarter in a row. The National
Statistics Institute in Madrid will release the report for the final three
months of the year on Jan. 23. Included in the total is Jose Nieto Lopez, for
whom a job remains as elusive as ever even after the economy limped out of its most recent
recession in the third quarter. The 49-year-old former security guard, who says
he’s up for any position going, is competing with an army of workless adults
for whom paid employment is becoming a distant memory.
Crunch
Escalates as Money Funds Rival Shadow Banks: China Credit - (www.bloomberg.com) A doubling in China’s money-market funds in the
past six months is draining bank deposits and raising the risk of financial
failures during cash crunches, according to Fitch Ratings. The assets under
management of such plans surged to a record 737 billion yuan ($122 billion) on
Dec. 31 from 304 billion yuan on June 30, said Roger Schneider,
senior director at Fitch’s Fund and Asset Manager Rating Group. Yu’E Bao,
managed by Tianhong Asset Management Co. and sold online by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., offers an
annualized return of 6.7 percent, compared with the 3 percent official one-year
savings rate. State-controlled banks have for decades benefited as rates set by
the government created a 3 percent spread between what they earn from loans and
what they pay on one-year deposits. While lending rates have been liberalized,
savings rates are still under state control, encouraging banks to market
so-called WMPs and trust funds that offer higher returns as well as higher
risk. Assets managed by China’s 67 trusts soared 60 percent to $1.67 trillion
in the 12 months ended September, dwarfing the scale of money-market funds.
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