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Why I did not go to jail (2014)

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Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#131

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

lenkite wrote: post #118

This is why I firmly believe that ALL law - every single piece of it should be written as a formal model with code so that assertions can be tested to see if something is illegal or not.

Would be nice. But that will require a very serious rewriting of all the laws.

For example, many crimes require a specific kind of intent. I don't know at this point how a piece of code can determine an intent.

1* Burglary is an act of breaking and entering of the dwelling place of another with the intent to commit a felony therein

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#132

Post by agustif »

chii wrote: post #126
lenkite wrote: post #118

This is why I firmly believe that ALL law - every single piece of it should be written as a formal model with code so that assertions can be tested to see if something is illegal or not.

that's ideal. But what happens if there's a bug? Who decides such an interaction of the law is a bug?

The Mythical Judge AI...

Recourse may not be processed

Terminate

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#133

Post by jessaustin »

As usual, Matt Levine had the most sensible take. [0] As long as federal prosecutors are happy to catch the little fish and leave the whales alone, the inherent contradictions of our capitalist system will continue to undermine our happiness and prosperity.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-02-06/martom...

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#134

Post by cosmodisk »

vageli wrote: post #77
cosmodisk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good start would be to write the law in a way an average Joe could understand it. I can already hear the legal sector screaming ' it's impossible!!'. A good example is the 'plain English' requirement for some documents issued by the financial institutions to retail customers in the UK. I saw first hand what that means when we did projects for banks: bank's analyst sends a report to a professional investor- the text…

I have seen some companies do this in the US but they always caveat the simple language version as being inferior to the legalese, and if you were to end up in proceedings against them it would be the latter document with the legal weight.

There are lots of legal terms that are very specific in their meaning and use and no alternatives can be used in legal proceedings,so they really have no choice in most situations. Unless the legal language and they way it's structured would change, nothing will change.

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#135

Post by [deleted] »

crowf wrote: post #106

> In retrospect, the only thing that kept me out of jail was some good luck and an outstanding General Counsel Is there no legal way for me as a non-lawyer to get a signed form from a lawyer saying that what I'm doing is legal? Then if it ends up to be illegal the lawyer could get in trouble rather than me. Or am I expected to know all the laws myself? And if a law is unclear, is there someway to ask for legally bind…

[deleted]

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#136

Post by m-p-3 »

croh wrote: post #120
istjohn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems there is more to this story than the author lets on. Michelle cheated on her personal taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193033

I never like the whole sentiment about taxation. Why is the taxation so complicated with full of weird language and many complicated clauses ? Ideally it should be very simple, so any layman (even not educated) can understand it. Most people I see either scared and pay taxes without understanding anything or people always looking for cheat. People who understand whole process thorougly and proud tax-payers are rare.…

Because you can't just rebuild the financial system from scratch in a single day, and most of that complexity comes from new rules or exceptions to patch a loophole or an unintended consequence

It's basically a legacy software that is kept alive with patches upon patches until it collapses.

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#137

Post by marcinzm »

mikem170 wrote: post #102
marcinzm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're not as smart as we think we are. We are, that's the problem. We find loopholes, we find edge cases, we bend rules to our benefit. Thus the bureaucracy must become ever more complicated to deal with our cleverness.

If we were so smart (as a society) these problem would not exists. Personally I think these things are scaling problems. I'd argue that we are not smart enough to centrally organize these things for 330+ million people. Perhaps the problem is that the federal government was never designed to do so much (tenth amendment). The federal government was designed to answer to the states, not 330+ million people. Look how mu…

You can't properly centrally organize a million people either unless they're culturally homogenous and you also use shared social pressure to enforce the "spirit" of the rules. Of course anyone not in that group is discriminated against so you better have a very homogenous society (the US doesn't anywhere at a state level).

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#138

Post by throwaway8581 »

nradov wrote: post #40
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of a political desire get the big bad rich people we have in the process turned every executive of a sufficiently complex operation into an unwitting criminal. Yet we only saw a small number of arrests come out of the 2008 housing crisis, despite widespread fraud. The few cases that were successfully prosecuted involved 9 and 10 figure fraud operations. At the core of the issues is the idea that ignorance of th…

If you think you have found a legal loophole or gray area then the correct course of action is to send a letter to the responsible federal agency (like the IRS) and request a formal opinion letter as to the legality of your scheme. Once you have it in writing then you're in the clear and won't be prosecuted.

I don’t think they’re in the business of giving formal opinion letters.

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#139

Post by toss1 »

phonon wrote: post #127
toss1 wrote: post #97

This is not just for cases in which you are at risk of going to jail. I was once offered part of my compensation in stock, and in what I'm sure they thought was an act of generosity (and motivation to take more stock vs cash), it included a 25% discount on whatever stock I took at the end of the contract. I had a vague recollection about this stock backdating and other issues, so I tracked down an attorney with exten…

1. You seem to be over-reacting...if you got stock at a discount, at most you would pay tax on the attributed income from the difference between what you paid and FMV. 2. Employee Stock Purchase Plans where you buy company stock at a discount (tax free) are a thing https://www.plancorp.com/blog/the-untold-advantages-of-your-...

1. Nope - the attny explicitly pointed to massive penalties and interest, that go far beyond the shortfall. Once they got a hold of this scheme, they REALLY did not want it to continue, and were happy to make examples of anyone stupid enough to keep trying it, or anything like it.

2. Yes, these may be possible under some circumstances, depending on the details, e.g., perhaps the program explicitly counts the not-discounted value as real-time income and pays the taxes, or, perhaps as in the original article, the are common but not actually legal.

As I pointed out, this counsel is a top corp/tax attorney and professor in the region, he didn't say exactly what I said, but when I re-characterized it back to him, he said, 'it doesn't work that way, but it's not far off -- don't touch this stuff'.

You do what you want, but I'm listening to the expert.

Re: Why I did not go to jail (2014)

#140

Post by cwmma »

croh wrote: post #120
istjohn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems there is more to this story than the author lets on. Michelle cheated on her personal taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7193033

I never like the whole sentiment about taxation. Why is the taxation so complicated with full of weird language and many complicated clauses ? Ideally it should be very simple, so any layman (even not educated) can understand it. Most people I see either scared and pay taxes without understanding anything or people always looking for cheat. People who understand whole process thorougly and proud tax-payers are rare.…

There was a proposal to just have the California tax authority just send out prefilled tax forms for you to look over, sign and send back with a check or info on where to send your refund, but then Intuit and anti tax groups (who were afraid that making it easier to pay taxes would make people less angry at paying taxes) lobbied hard enough to kill it.
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