NSW Workers’ Compensation insurer, icare, found to have had too many snouts in the through,
“Icare”? More like “I couldn’t care less”.
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icare … only about the bottom line. 
A job for the wife is such an astonishingly obvious conflict of interest - even if there had been a proper tender process.
Nevertheless the ABC seems to be complaining about two issues that are in contradiction.
- icare is losing millions of dollars
- icare is aggressive in getting people off compo.
Snouts in troughs makes good media copy, and good sniping in parliament, but it isn’t relevant to the bigger picture problem here, which is the long term financial viability of the WorkCover scheme.
Perhaps losing Dollars due to improper use of their resources, jobs for mates type stuff, employing contractors or others and often at higher rates when they have in-house expertise,
Perhaps too agressive in that they force people back into the workforce ill-prepared or still too afflicted to safely return to work. Then this leads to costly litigation and often increased payouts for those failures.
That would not seem contradictory, but rather two or more failings that add to the struggle to remain viable. How else do we ensure those that get injured at work have some financial stability as they recover? Often the payments they receive are below that of their normal pay rates, the medical care they receive is often inflated above that on a Non Compensatory injury. The rorts are more often by the services than by the injured parties.
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I don’t doubt that but … wrong order of magnitude to be explained away as overpaid executives, jobs for mates, or even employing contractors exclusively.
Quoting from an article linked to the above article:
“liabilities are now greater than their assets by $459 million”
That would pay for 500 wives for three years. 
Or even worse:
“I’m saying the liabilities are undercooked by about $6 billion, money they don’t have”
You can convert that to wife-years.
Quite possibly. I’ve seen other examples of that. So maybe when you go to a medical practitioner … there is one price if you go there as a private individual, paying for it directly yourself, and an X% markup when you go there as part of a compo claim.
Having said that, I’ve seen the X% markup mean that you get priority service e.g. they are happy to provide same day service or within a few days, rather than go on a queue and wait weeks or months.
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A cross reference by request
FinCEN is a US law to combat money laundering. As with many US laws it has a very long reach with most governments complying. For some details click on the following.
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It doesn’t seem to be mandatory to provide that information. If you don’t then presumably your income etc. is reported to the US government - but if you are not a US citizen and not a US resident, that is unlikely to have negative implications? (if you don’t mind sharing that information with the US government)
Bold as copied…
The Australian government has entered into an agreement for the new global standards on the automatic exchange of financial account information . Financial institutions from around the world are required by law to collect and report this information to the tax authorities.
Re FATCA, US citizens are the targets 
Eritrean nationals would also be affected. Anyone holding cross border assets could also get caught up.
For most people it is a simple case of identifying Australia as their only tax residency. I am not sure if that is a default or one must so state. I suspect the latter because that provides a legal basis for charging (eg) an American national who does not fess up.
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By mandatory, I meant mandatory for the customer. As you say, that in part goes to what “the default” is.
Perhaps it operates like the TFN system. It is not mandatory to provide a relevant financial institution with a TFN, and if you don’t then there are implications.
What are the negative implications? If you don’t mind having your details etc. passed on to the US government then what are the negative implications?
Sure, if you are a US citizen, hiding out in Australia and hiding assets and concealing income from the US government, you would be concerned about this.
If you are an Australian citizen and resident, not so much, other than the general privacy and data trafficking concerns, as canvassed in the relevant topic.
I am querying in this topic the financial implications.
Potentially tax evasion (for those so inclined). Or at least a nice audit with a friendly group of government employees. 
FWIW if an Australian financial institution does not try Very Hard to get all their customers to ‘fill out the declaration’ the US can penalise them if they do business in the US. Thus our banks will do what they need to do to comply.
One problem with this system seems to be that it is being applied at the level of the financial institution. So if you have 100 existing investments with 100 institutions, you will be asked 100 times for your citizenship - when the dumb Australian government already knows that you are an Australian citizen (and even if they don’t, they should do after you have filled out the first of the 100 declarations) and the dumb US government already knows that you are not a US citizen.
But let’s say that you are clean. Absolutely, if you are involved in tax evasion, you would not want to draw attention to yourself.
Maybe.
Only by the share registries for ‘investments’ but if you have 100 bank accounts with 100 different banks you are correct. A more rational way to implement FATCA would have been to declare tax residency directly to the ATO once and be done with it since the ATO becomes the middle man doing the reporting to the US IRS anyway in our implementation. In some countries the financial institutions report to the US IRS directly. As a result US citizens are persona non-grata as customers in parts of the world.
Which is not the point in these times of many dual nationals. FWIW the government does not authoritatively know who is and is not a citizen in every case, but that discussion is not germane here.
Even US Green Card holders (eg non-citizen permanent residents) are subject to filing US taxes every year, even if they are outside the US for a few years with a different tax home.
They can, no maybes, if they are deemed not to have made the expected Herculean (or at least an honest) effort that satisfies the US.
I hope this discussion is interesting to the majority of members who are not affected, but whom might see FATCA and FinCEN as entertaining as well as frightening for how the tax authorities around the world, led by the US, are subordinating privacy to identify money laundering from criminal activity and so on, it is becoming a brave new world where privacy is slowly but surely being diluted. Are some government’s pushing back? They try but when it comes to potentially more taxes for themselves they get conflicted.
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A bigger fine than I was expecting, if memory serves. I guess they wanted to make an example of them.
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Now just think if Westpac had put even a tenth of that fine towards supporting a political party that would give it a lighter touch regulatory environment.
Big fines create big incentives.
Definitely cheaper to replace the government …
Spending nearly that big didn’t help a certain in your face custard coloured party that much?
And Clive is still being chased in the courts.
For Westpac each individual offence apparently carried a maximum penalty of up to $17,000.
Multiplied by 23 million offences that’s more than the Govt is spending in response to Covid?
As the participants on the ABC’s The Drum program 24th Sept highlighted, Westpac in the end got off lightly. It only paid $57 on average per offence. Quite a saving on $17,000 and much less than Commbank $700M fine for 53,506 offences. IE ($13,803 per offence).
Nothing to do with politics? The Drum discussion suggested the consequences of destroying the bank would have done more public harm. It was noted that the fine goes to public revenue and in no way provides compensation for harm that may have arisen from the failures by Westpac. A little more on that from the ABC, although the header seems a little confused! 
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Another government initiative is announced. Responsible lending is on the shelf (subtitled: Let personal debt roll). Certainly a two edged sword trying to pump prime retail again that can be debatable as to its appropriateness.
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Well yes. I was pondering if the plague would make anybody stop and think if endless growth was really worth pursuing quite so vigorously: apparently not. People have no money to spend, retail takes a huge hit, the constant feed of immigration is cut off … The sky is falling! I would not want to go cold turkey and stop growth altogether over a short period as we have no idea how to run an economy without it. But we have no idea how to make endless growth on a finite world work either.
Speaking of appropriateness, getting the property market booming again has some obvious justification in the endless growth model but the side effect is absurd property prices in the big cities. Is it appropriate to allow an artificial scarcity of a commodity to put the young in debt so the old can be wealthy?
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Agree, there is no shortage of bedrooms across the nation. No need to build any more for some time 5-10 years supply has been hidden away from the eyes of the public?
The ABS has all the numbers of dwellings, occupancy and average numbers of bedrooms.
The stats need to include dwellings that did not return a form (IE empty on the night) all the accommodation in retirement villages, permanent van sites and aged care to get a fuller picture.
I’ve misplaced the totals somewhere along the way in the community posts. There are more bedrooms than sleepers even if we all sleep alone, more so as many share a bed or bedroom.
It’s made all the more obvious, as despite the massive numbers of returned Australians due to Covid there is room for them, the homeless and all those here temporarily. Working from home has been a great way to take pressure off the inner city price monster. It may even make nice ex family homes in the outer burbs more valued, and allow the older generation to sell at a reasonable price. One that will leave them with real change after purchasing a more practical (Bargain?) modern apartment over looking inner Melbourne parklands or Sydney Harbour because no one works in the city any more?
P.S.
The younger ones though will firstly need jobs, good jobs preferably and time to save before being harnessed to the debt merry go round us oldies had to navigate with minimum 30% or higher deposits and double digit interest rates.
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“We got rid of the idea of ‘buyer beware’ in consumer law decades ago,” says @AlanKirkland. “To make it the principle that guides lending in the middle of a recession has disaster written all over it.”
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Never has there been a more blatant sign of shortsighted greed.
Rolling back protection against crushing debt that sees people waste money on something they can’t keep? Sometimes losing another asset, or mum’s house, because the bank knew they probably couldn’t afford it and demanded a guarantee to sweeten the pot they would inevitably win.
Let’s not pretend. This isn’t about economic recovery, it’s about unaffordable hiked loans meaning hiked house prices meaning hiked profits for those who already own a bunch (or voters who want to sell in a better market).
Responsible lending laws are a source of pride for our country. They don’t stifle borrowing, that’s stupid. They just help borrowing be something that, oh my gawd, might actually be sustained.
The accusation that they “had never really been enforced” (amp.abc.net.au/article/12702260) is absolutely untrue.
What they weren’t, was advertised. They only existed to be discovered by people who were drowning and happened to hear about them, or desperately googled for options to get out of an unaffordable contract, or discovered financial counsellors were a thing and through them discovered the rights they never knew they had.
Consumers are not sophisticated borrowers. They’re excited. Hopeful. They feel flattered and trusted when banks allow a loan. At most they might do an online calculator before applying (to get a ballpark idea of the max they could borrow) and then they hand in whatever is asked of them and pray to be approved.
They don’t think about stability of income, or paying ahead, or unexpected future costs of illness or children or divorce. Many can’t see past the chance to have their own home, an increasingly expensive and distant dream. Most are already borrowing at their upper limit simply because that’s where house prices are.
It is absolutely 100% the more sophisticated party’s job to be the rational ‘numbers guy’ in that partnership. The responsible lending laws are critical to make that happen.
The high court decision to allow HEM was already a damaging decision. Stripping away even more protection? On the shallow, false excuse of boosting economic performance? Using the pandemic as a smokescreen to strip away public protections for the benefit of banks and corporations?
If Josh Frydenberg was in front of me right now, I would spit on him.
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I agree in disagreeing with this proposal.
One thing that piqued my interest was that the Treasurer said on ABC News TV that the number of loans are falling, yet the economic commentators that were on later in the morning were disputing this. I would like to have the Treasurer back up his assertions with some solid facts and figures. Otherwise it does seem like the Banking Royal Commission’s beneficial outcomes are being wound back.
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