My experience is that smaller art galleries tend to have art from local artists, rather than pieces stolen from other countries. As an art student last year, I did two day trips to a nearby town that was an artist colony (prior to tourism and the housing crisis forcing out everyone but the wealthy) and while the largest gallery had some national and international works on display, they also prominently featured local artists, and the small galleries were 100% local.
Support your local art galleries, folks. The art is more ethically obtained (either purchased or loaned from the creator, not stolen), and you’re helping artists from your own community. Plus you get to see some amazing art from creators who aren’t famous enough for a big museum to pay attention to.
I can see how the richest 10% of the entire global population would include a fair chunk of the middle class in the richest nations. But the article specifies the richest 10% of many countries causing more emissions than the poorest 10% of their fellow citizens - and neither the richest nor poorest 10% of those countries are “middle class”. They definitely do not know what “middle” means.
Edit: reading further into the article, they do actually specify that the middle class of many rich countries are in the top 10% globally - anyone earning over £32k/$40k are in the top 10% for the entire global population, despite these being very modest incomes in the UK and US respectively.
I think there genuinely is an issue where large businesses just aren’t checked as thoroughly as small ones. It’s much easier to check every invoice over X when there’s only a few thousand invoices, compared to when there’s millions or even hundreds of millions of invoices. There’s also the fact that the value of X varies based on the size of the business. I had a few really tiny clients where X was 10, because for the size of the business and the revenue they did, 10 was significant. There were others where X was 1000. Obviously at both of those thresholds, a gold toilet is going to stick out - and for the tiny business, would probably also trigger a money laundering/fraud report (no accountant-client confidentiality when financial crimes are being committed. This is another area where the big firms are given a lot of leeway that small ones are not).
So I can definitely see how for a megacorporation, the auditor may well conclude that no invoice for less than 1,000,000 is worth the effort of looking at, and it becomes quite easy to start sneaking through those gold toilets on <1,000,000 invoices if you know the auditor isn’t going to look at them.
As much as I have my doubts about AI, I think accountancy and audit is one of those professions where it could be a useful tool. If an AI could run through all the invoices and just flag the ones that look weird, regardless of value, for a human to take a closer look at, it would make a measurable difference - assuming a sufficiently unbiased and correctly trained AI, of course!
Inspecting every invoice? No. Inspecting large invoices? Yes. Inspecting large invoices not related to cost-of-sales? Yes. For one of our larger clients, their annual audit took 75% of the accountancy staff, in addition to the auditing staff, because every invoice over a certain threshold had to be looked at.
And if I’d seen an invoice for extensive renovations where some of the parts purchased looked questionable (like a solid gold toilet), I absolutely wouldn’t have taken that on faith as a genuine business expense that should be used to reduce profit, and would have questioned it. If there was a huge payment going out and no invoice to support it, I wouldn’t have taken it on faith that was a business expense. While it would have been up to my boss at the time whether it was included, it would have been negligent of me to see a massive invoice for something obviously excessive and not raise a query about its validity.
And yes, if there were questions about whether something large and excessive had genuinely been installed in the office rather than the business owner’s private home (and a gold toilet would invite questions like that), my boss would have asked to go and have a look before signing off on it being a business expense. And even then, if the gold toilet was in the business owner’s work office, it would likely still have been considered personal expenditure when it’s quite clearly excessive and quite clearly only for him personally. We have tax rules in this country that where a proportion of a business expense is determined to be personal in nature, it gets added back into the profit when the tax is calculated. While typically this is stuff like a business owner using the company van to run personal errands, or a farmer where part of the electricity and water use for the whole property applies to the living quarters (this is often estimated, like saying “5% of motor expenses, 10% of power and water, etc”, but the principle is that if a percentage is personal not business, then it’s not deductible for tax purposes), it would also apply to the inclusion of a gold toilet for personal use in an otherwise business-related office renovation.
Please read my disclaimer. I’m not from the US, and my experience is based on accountancy in my own country. No company in my country complies with SOX, because that’s a US law and doesn’t apply to the rest of the world.
While large corporations in this country are audited, they use the large auditors who have in fact been found to have done some pretty dodgy shit that a small auditor or accountant would not have gotten away with, while the regulators turn a blind eye. The large auditors also enable large companies to use tax loopholes that are not available to small businesses, so my point that closing the loopholes would make a big difference stands. And sure, the smaller accountants and auditors do this kind of crap too (corruption exists everwhere) - but the difference is that they’re held to account when they get caught. It is factually the case that those with more money don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
I’m also not an accountant anymore. Did it for ten years and came to absolutely hate it as more of my time was spent on larger businesses. I loved working for the little guys, as overall I found them more reasonable. I never worked on any public companies, but I did work on a few charities (which have many similar rules to public companies in this country), and the corruption amongst the leadership was directly proportional to the size of the charity. There’s one major charity I won’t donate to anymore because I know just how much corruption there is at the top.
If a company has bought and “loaned” or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family’s “startup” and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend’s businesses, then those are considered “expenses”. The actual profit has been “reinvested back into the business” and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn’t matter that the gold toilet in the CEO’s personal office bathroom isn’t necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.
The really annoying thing is this shit doesn’t fly for small businesses. I worked as an accountant for over ten years, for SME’s (small and medium enterprises), and there were extensive rules on what was and wasn’t allowed as an expense for tax purposes. There’s tax rules on cars, phones, etc given to executives that ensure somebody is paying tax on it, and there’s tax rules on capital investment/reinvestment in the business that separates it from business expenses for tax purposes (basically, tax is generally calculated based on what’s on the profit&loss, not the balance sheet, and investment is a balance sheet item).
A lot of good could be done by ensuring large businesses are forced to comply by the same tax rules as small ones - and accountants for large businesses that try to hide the owner’s personal expenditure amongst business expenditure should be held to the same standards as accountants for small businesses. If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired. I’d have gotten arrested for fraud. Accountancy is a regulated profession, but the big accountancy companies often just ignore the regulations that would get a smaller company in a lot of trouble.
So yeah, I broadly agree with you. This move by Germany is meaningless without some serious overhaul of how tax laws apply (or don’t apply) to large corporations and their accountants. Closing all the loopholes so there’s no legal route to reducing profit without genuine business expenses (not fake, made-up “expenses”) would make it much harder for companies to bend the rules to their favour.
~Disclaimer: all the above is based on my experience with accountancy in my own country. Legislation and tax rules vary by geography.
Heard the same suggestion on a podcast recently as well, IIRC. And she’s got party leadership ambitions. At least if she gets it, the Tories will be unelectable for at least a decade. Nutella Suella is appealing to the far right, but absolutely abhorrent to anyone to the left of that. Even centre right people think she’s absolutely deranged and would rather have a Labour government than her.
The article says it was the guy’s first time using mushrooms - which means he didn’t know what effect they would have on him. So on one hand, this was not foreseeable because he wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that taking mushrooms would cause him to not sleep for 40 hours. On the other hand, given that mushrooms can have adverse effects on some people, and he had no way of knowing if he’d be one of those people, taking mushrooms shortly before getting on a plane probably wasn’t the best decision. “Guy makes stupid decision” is definitely the headline here, rather than “mushrooms are bad”.