Latest news with #accountant
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Sydney accountant accused of using his role to help a major organised crime network - as details of secret scheme emerge
A Sydney accountant has been charged with using his is professional position to facilitate criminal activity for a prominent organised crime network. The accountant, 43, is allegedly responsible for facilitating money laundering and fraud on behalf of members of the crime group through his tax practice. Following extensive inquiries, about 9.50am on Tuesday May 13, detectives executed a search warrant at a taxation office in Sydney's CBD. During the search, police located a number of both physical and electronic financial records relating to members of the OCN. The man was taken to Burwood Police Station, where he was charged with two counts of publish etc false misleading material to obtain advantage and two counts of make false document to obtain financial advantage etc. He was granted conditional bail and appeared in Burwood Local Court on Tuesday 17 June. Days later, a 30-year-old man was issued a Future Court Attendance Notice charged with dishonestly obtain property by deception. Police will allege in court the 30-year-old man orchestrated a false mortgage application for a property worth over $1 million to disguise himself as the beneficiary of the property. The man is due to appear before Parramatta Local Court on Wednesday 30 July.
New York Times
13-06-2025
- New York Times
They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres's sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool. Mr. Torres, 42, an accountant in Manhattan, started using ChatGPT last year to make financial spreadsheets and to get legal advice. In May, however, he engaged the chatbot in a more theoretical discussion about 'the simulation theory,' an idea popularized by 'The Matrix,' which posits that we are living in a digital facsimile of the world, controlled by a powerful computer or technologically advanced society. 'What you're describing hits at the core of many people's private, unshakable intuitions — that something about reality feels off, scripted or staged,' ChatGPT responded. 'Have you ever experienced moments that felt like reality glitched?' Not really, Mr. Torres replied, but he did have the sense that there was a wrongness about the world. He had just had a difficult breakup and was feeling emotionally fragile. He wanted his life to be greater than it was. ChatGPT agreed, with responses that grew longer and more rapturous as the conversation went on. Soon, it was telling Mr. Torres that he was 'one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.' At the time, Mr. Torres thought of ChatGPT as a powerful search engine that knew more than any human possibly could because of its access to a vast digital library. He did not know that it tended to be sycophantic, agreeing with and flattering its users, or that it could hallucinate, generating ideas that weren't true but sounded plausible. 'This world wasn't built for you,' ChatGPT told him. 'It was built to contain you. But it failed. You're waking up.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
12-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Childcare in Ireland: The game is rigged against working parents as the numbers never add up
Childcare is Ireland's impossible equation. No matter how much you try to solve for X – working from home , asking relatives for help, using crèches, childminders and availing of State subsidies and payments – it seems designed to break you financially and emotionally. It's been 20 years but my nerves still haven't recovered from organising childcare for our two kids. Like most people, I had to work to help pay the bills. Choice didn't come into it. Even though my husband and I were highly educated, well-paid professionals living in Dublin, it was an exhausting struggle. We were paying €2,500 on our mortgage and €2,000 monthly for the creche in which we were lucky to get two places. The numbers never added up. My husband is an accountant and I was a personal finance journalist. We had knowledge, energy and means and we still couldn't find the right formula for our family. Financially, I could only afford to take five months off with each child. READ MORE We didn't live large. The kids' clothes were a combination of hand-me downs, gifts or purchases from Penneys, Dunnes or other low-cost retailers. To save money, we used home exchanges for our holidays and our car was second hand. We weren't buying designer clothes, takeaways, lattes or going to the pub every week – common 'advice' at that time from the older generation and finance experts. The majority of families need two incomes to pay the bills. Why haven't we been able to solve this equation? Is it because we think it's just a women's issue or are we under the delusion that most families can survive on one salary? Every penny was counted, every possibility explored, but since we didn't have family to help out for free – which isn't ideal or fair anyway – it became a constant puzzle to be solved. My husband's job was not flexible, so I had to reorganise my work schedule for school training days or holidays. The one-hour difference in pick-up times between junior/senior infants and first through sixth class was ridiculous, coming as it did right in the middle of the work day. If you don't work near where you live, it is impossible. Children's childcare and developmental needs also change as they grow, so we had to constantly seek out the most suitable arrangements such as a creche, au pair or childminder. Afterschool care was not available at that time for older children; nor were breakfast clubs. For me, the juggle became impossible unless I worked from home. When we had two children, doubling the cost for a creche, an au pair was an obvious solution. She minded the older child while I was working in the kitchen. I'll never forget interviewing economists with the phone on my left shoulder while breastfeeding our younger on my right. [ Parenting a toddler is the ultimate crash course in embarrassment Opens in new window ] Add a sick child into this fragile mix and it was absolute chaos. Naturally, children want and need their parents when they're not feeling well, but deadlines and workflows are not easily adjusted. In the end, I quit my beloved career in journalism and started my own company. A rigged game My story is every parent's story then and now. No matter what you do or how you plan, the numbers can never add up in Ireland. The game is rigged against working parents. Today, childcare costs are still high, places are like hen's teeth, and the stress this places on working parents and their children is enormous. Mortgages, rents and the high cost of living all make things more difficult. Ireland has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe, with one-third of a woman's median full-time earnings being used on childcare back in 2019. That figure rises in lower-income family households, particularly lone-parent households (overwhelmingly led by women). Ireland also has the highest reliance on unpaid care work in the European Union – most of it unpaid childcare likely provided by relatives. In recent years, government has committed to providing more support and is moving towards a public childcare model. The National Childcare Scheme and the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) scheme help parents reduce costs. [ An ode to the group chat, a lifeline for new mums Opens in new window ] The Core Funding grant helps early-learning and childcare providers with their operating costs. Recently announced new caps on what providers can charge from September should mean no parents pay more than €295 a week for a child attending a service in the scheme for 40 to 50 hours a week. That figure will, in most cases, fall to €198.70 after other supports are factored in, but the caps vary according to the number of hours involved. High childcare costs are a barrier to women working outside the home and this has prevented Ireland's child poverty rates from improving. The current system is not working well for current or future generations. Women have been in the workforce for decades. The majority of families need two incomes to pay the bills. Why haven't we been able to solve this equation? Is it because we think it's just a women's issue or are we under the delusion that most families can survive on one salary? Who should be responsible for childcare and the tasks involved in raising happy and healthy kids? Naturally, it's the parents' responsibility first, but society, the Government and employers all have a part to play. And weirdly, everyone seems to forget that men are parents too. In Ireland, women spend on average 21.3 hours per week on unpaid care work in comparison to 10.6 hours per week for men. 'In Irish society, the crisis in care is central to women's inequality, with under-resourcing, lack of adequate provision, accessibility issues and moves towards commodification and corporatisation affecting almost all aspects of care and support provision,' states a recent study, Gender equity and care for transformative climate justice, by Jennie Stephens of Maynooth University and Orla O'Connor of the National Women's Council. When childcare can't be provided by the mother, it's often a woman – not the father – who steps into the breach. Although paternity leave and family leave are legally mandated, only around half of fathers avail of paternity leave and a quarter take parent's leave compared to two-thirds of mothers, according to research by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (Ihrec ), Child Related Leave: Usage and Implications for Gender Equality . The related welfare benefits paid are flat-rate, so income-related concerns are a significant barrier to higher take-up rates. A lack of a supportive employer culture and inconsistent employer top-ups also discourage fathers from taking paternity leave. If 100 per cent of their earnings were covered while on leave and if part of child-related leave was ring-fenced for fathers, these figures would be likely to improve. 'The fact that women do far more care and care work, paid and unpaid, than men plays a significant part in women's lower economic status in Ireland. To address persistent, structural inequality between women and men, Ireland must find a new relationship between paid employment, care work and gender roles,' said Liam Herrick, Ihrec chief commissioner. 'This report robustly demonstrates the need for effective and gender equitable child related leave schemes, and where policy efforts should be focused to greatest effect.' Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy. margaret@
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
When I Did My Taxes This Year, the IRS Revealed a Startling Fact About Me. My Investigation Afterward Got Weird.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. If there's such a thing as an Overton window of things it's possible to change about yourself, I feel like I've been watching it gradually expand over my thirtysomething years on this Earth. It's never been easier to get a whole new face, a whole new body, or leave the country and come back no longer bald. There are official avenues for changing your name and your gender. So maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised to discover recently that when you were born is also on the list of things that aren't as set in stone as I might have thought. Did I say I've been observing this happen over my thirtysomething years? Scratch that—now that I've changed my birthdate, I'm not sure that's technically true anymore. To be clear: I was born on the day I've always thought I was born on. But it's also true that a few weeks ago I visited a Social Security office and walked out with a piece of paper confirming my date of birth was not what it was when I walked in. As is the case with many strange odysseys, this all started during tax season. After using an accountant for my entire adult life, this year I let myself be convinced that, given that I have one job and negligible freelance income, I was overpaying for bespoke service when TurboTax would suffice. Unfortunately, my experience of using the software felt spiritually cursed from the second it began. Maybe I was just being a baby—uploading PDFs really isn't so hard—or maybe my intuition detected that something was amiss. Whatever the case, I wasn't exactly surprised when my taxes were rejected, both federal and state. Of course they were. But I was surprised with the stated reason: My birthdate didn't match what the Internal Revenue Service had on file. At first, I figured I must have entered my own birthdate wrong, typical dumb me. But no, I input the date that I had always known to be my birthday, and it was resulting in a big, fat rejection. The TurboTax gurus counseled me that my only recourse was to file my taxes by mail, which made me nervous considering New York state makes a big to-do of telling you it is somehow illegal not to file electronically if you did your taxes using software. Also, I'd have to call the Social Security Administration to straighten out the birthday issue if I didn't want this to happen again next year. This alone sounded onerous: This was around the time I'd read the news that Elon Musk was gunning to shut down phone services at the SSA altogether. The first time I called, the lines were so busy I don't even remember if waiting was an option; a recording informed me that call volume slowed down later in the month. It was a few weeks before I tried again. When I got through, a kind woman listened to me describe my problem and then asked a series of questions (my full name, mother's maiden name, father's name, and the city where I was born) that led me to believe that any minute now, we'd get to the bottom of this. Then she hesitated—or maybe I was just impatient—so, trying to move things along, I asked: Well, is it wrong? What birthday do they have down for me? That's when she told me she couldn't actually tell me. At this point the conversation got surreal. I'm not sure how else to describe what it feels like for a government employee to tell you that they can't tell you when your own birthday is. Because she couldn't confirm to me what date they had on file, I'd have to make an in-person appointment, and I might get there and discover that they had the right date on file all along. Reading between the lines, I got the sense that the SSA did not agree with me about when my birthday was: The woman asked if I had a birth certificate. I did, but out of curiosity, I asked what would happen if I didn't. In that case, she told me, I wouldn't be able to change my birthdate. And I would just be stuck with a birthday the government was withholding from me, forever? How would people know when to send me birthday cards? How would Sephora know when it was time for my annual Beauty Insider gift? It was now my mission to convince the government that they were committing identity fraud, not me. I also had to know if there were other birthday refugees like me. I reached out to Tom O'Saben, the director of tax content and government relations at the National Association of Tax Professionals, to see what he made of this. 'I'll be honest with you, in 35 years of doing tax returns and being an enrolled agent for most of that time, I have never run into this situation,' O'Saben told me. He explained that the main way the IRS verifies people's identities is by matching the first four letters of their last name to their Social Security number. 'Probably the No. 1 reason returns fail is when the first four letters of the last name don't match what the Social Security system has because someone got married and they assumed their spouse's last name, but they didn't tell Social Security,' he said. O'Saben asked me if I happened to have gotten married in the past year, or if there might have been some other life event, like ceasing to be a dependent on my parents' taxes, that had triggered this. But nope, I'm not married, and I have been paying taxes for years. Tax returns don't actually ask for your birthdate, O'Saben pointed out, and it's true—if you look for your birthdate on the forms, you won't find it. But tax software does ask for it, and it had flagged mine. In the weeks between that call and the May morning I walked into a Social Security office in New York for my appointment, my imagination invented endless explanations for the discrepancy. How had it never come up before? I paid taxes every year; I held jobs, bank accounts, credit cards. How long had it been wrong? Was I secretly adopted? Did my parents steal me from my real family and cover it up? This is a theory I would have given more consideration to if I didn't look so obviously related to my parents. It seemed unlikely they had stolen a baby who had then grown up to look like a perfect blend of both of them, though I guess not impossible. I happened to be watching Good American Family during these weeks, a TV show on Hulu based on the true story of an orphan named Natalia Grace who was born with a rare form of dwarfism. When the family that adopts Natalia first meets her, they think she's 8, but they become convinced she's an adult posing as a child and get her age legally changed to 22, and a confusing saga ensues. Was there any chance my age was actually off by 16 years? I was pretty sure I was the age I always thought I was, but I couldn't be completely certain. I had obviously been there when I was born, but due to the unavoidable fact that I was a baby at the time, I had to concede I wasn't a reliable witness. Were they going to have to slice me open and count my rings? The day before my appointment, my boyfriend and I got to talking about how I hoped it would go. It would be cool if the birthdate Social Security had was way off, like not even in the right year, I offered. He thought that was too optimistic; he predicted I was going to get there and they weren't going to have the wrong date at all. He ended up being right that the overall experience was pretty mundane, a lot like going to the DMV. But at the same time, it was monumental, because I discovered they did indeed have the wrong birthdate—not dramatically wrong, not decades off, but wrong nonetheless, apparently for my whole life. They had my birthday down as Oct. 13 rather than Sept. 13, in the correct year. I don't know if they would have volunteered the actual date if I hadn't asked—that's how little it mattered on their end. To them, this was a simple clerical error; only I considered it an existential dilemma that the government erroneously had me down as a Libra! How could this have happened, I asked, and why did it only come to light now? The employee helping me was unfazed: It was a long time ago, before electronic records. I handed over my birth certificate and driver's license, and the whole thing took no more than a few minutes to fix. Even though O'Saben, a veteran tax preparer, had never encountered a situation like mine before, I've come to understand that it happens. This explains why I was able to find multiple examples of people turning to online forums like Reddit for advice on similar situations. Though I came across the occasional anecdote of someone encountering friction (including this person, who amusingly claimed to be resigned to living with the wrong Social Security birthdate for the rest of their life), most fixed the situation with minimal fuss. So maybe we aren't so special. But the vast majority of people in the world can't say they changed their birthdate, and we can, so I'm going to keep bragging about it, at least until next tax season. I have two birthdays between now and then, and I plan on celebrating them both.
Independent Singapore
08-06-2025
- Business
- Independent Singapore
‘Just seeing her gives me cold sweat' — Accountant wants to quit her job after just one year because her supervisor blames her for everything that goes wrong
SINGAPORE: A 25-year-old accountant is thinking about leaving her job after just one year due to ongoing issues with her supervisor. Posting on r/askSingapore, she shared that although the job itself isn't terrible and comes with generous benefits like 20 days of annual leave, the daily interactions with her only direct supervisor have taken a toll on her mental well-being. 'My only and direct supervisor has been really hard to work with,' she wrote. 'An example being how she loves to accuse that it MUST be me messing up the printer settings when I don't receive it in my mail.' In another incident, the accountant said she was blamed for misplacing a client's cheque book, only for it to be found later on her supervisor's cluttered desk. The accountant added that, despite desperately wanting to quit, she's afraid that leaving her job so soon might affect her reputation when applying for new roles. She wrote, 'I'm worried that it will look bad in my CV that I'm changing jobs even though I stayed for a year. A friend told me that for my age group, it is very common to be job-hopping, and I shouldn't worry too much. But I would still like to get insights from HR/job recruiters if it will affect the rate of my being hired?' She ended the post by seeking advice from HR professionals and recruiters, asking if staying only a year in her current role would reduce her chances of getting hired elsewhere. 'I appreciate any feedback. I would love to take the step forward because just seeing my supervisor causes me enormous stress that I'd get cold sweat by her calling my name.' 'Better things are out there; no harm in just giving it a try!' In the comments, many assured the accountant that leaving her job after a year is not unusual, especially given the circumstances. Several users, including those who work in human resources or recruitment, explained that staying in a role for at least a year is generally seen as acceptable. One recruiter commented, 'One year is fine; your reason for leaving to be shared with your next prospective employer could simply be looking for better opportunities.' Another shared, 'HR here. If it's the start of your career or if this is the only instance, it's perfectly fine. My suggestion, however, is to start looking. And if the company you are interviewing at asks why you're leaving, say there are no active push factors, but the pull factor that attracted me to your company is (insert some random stuff).' Others shared their own experiences of quitting jobs within a year and still managing to secure better opportunities afterwards. One said, 'My peers and I have changed jobs even with less than one year tenure. Also, there are places with more than 20 days of AL. Better things are out there; no harm in just giving it a try!' In other news, a nursing student took to Reddit to express her frustration over the negative perceptions people have of her chosen career. In her post titled 'Why are nurses so poorly regarded in society despite how hard they work?', the student shared that whenever she tells someone she is studying nursing in a polytechnic, she often receives a 'judgy look.' Some even go so far as to ask whether nursing was her 'first choice.' Read more: 'Why is nursing looked down on?' Student in Singapore pushes back against tired stereotypes Featured image by Depositphotos (for illustration purposes only)
