Take Note
TAX CHEATS CREATE HUGE GAP
If you invent a smarter mousetrap, chances are smarter mice will
figure out a way to defeat it. That’s what the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) is learning when it comes to catching tax cheats.
Because the methods of cheating grow increasingly sophisticated—including
complicated tax shelters to hide income—the IRS barely has
the resources to keep pace, and is losing ground to tax evasion.
The widespread knowledge of the IRS’ lack of resources and
the absence of fear of getting caught has tempted more taxpayers
to take their chances when it comes to tax evasion.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti says there is “a huge gap
between the number of taxpayers whom the IRS knows are not filing,
not reporting or not paying what they owe and our capacity to require
them to comply.”
TONS OF CELL PHONES TOSSED EACH YEAR
No question, we are a nation of cell phone users. According to statistics
published in the New York Times, cell phone use in the United States
surged to more than 128 million subscribers last year from 340,000
in 1985. The problem is, each phone typically is used for 18 months
before being dropped for a newer model.
That’s adding up to a huge amount of waste, says Inform, an
environmental organization that issued a report this year on old
phones. By 2005, the report estimates, 130 million cell phones will
be thrown out each year. Counting the phones, batteries and chargers,
that comes to 65,000 tons a year.
INTERVIEW BLOOPERS
OfficeTeam, a staffing service, recently asked 150 executives from
among the largest 1,000 U.S. companies for some of the strangest
things they’ve ever heard while conducting job interviews.
Their answers included:
• A candidate who picked up his cell phone after the first
few questions to call his parents to let them know the interview
was going well.
• A candidate who had asked for an early morning interview
showed up with a box of doughnuts, which he ate during the meeting.
He explained that this was the only chance he’d get to eat
breakfast before going to work.
• After being complimented on his choice of college and grade
point average, one candidate admitted he was happy that caught the
interviewer’s attention, because he didn’t really attend
that school.
SMALL IS BETTER
Here’s another reason you might be glad you run a small business.
Many small businesses are countercyclical—they do well when
the economy and other businesses aren’t.
William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation
of Independent Business, says firms in the financial, insurance
and real estate markets have fared better than most during the latest
economic downturn.
INTERNET SURVIVES ‘POWERFUL’
ATTACK
The Internet and its various connections have become so big you
probably didn’t even notice a “powerful” attack in
October on the computer servers that handle global Internet traffic.
According to the Associated Press, the FBI and the White House say
nine of the 13 root servers that manage Internet traffic were attacked—with
seven servers failing to respond to legitimate network traffic while
two others failed intermittently.
The FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center says the
attack lasted only an hour during which time the attackers transmitted
30 to 40 times the normal amount of data to each of these servers.
Experts immediately took defensive steps before the attack suddenly
stopped.
The 13 computer servers in question are spread across the globe as
a precaution against physical disasters. They are operated by U.S.
government agencies, universities, corporations and private organizations. |
