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I’ve just completed a two-week research project in Washington DC into the laws governing the operations of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS’s operations are starkly and vastly superior to those of the ATO. The difference is in the laws covering the IRS.

Here’s my brief two-minute YouTube overview of what I’ve discovered.  More...

1 July 2019 proved an historic day for US taxpayers when President Trump signed into law the Taxpayers First Act.

The Act is intended to bring discipline to the US tax agency (IRS) after years of strong evidence of both its administrative incompetence and systemic abuse of taxpayers, particularly small business people.  More...

Last week, our Executive Director, Ken Phillips, contemplated some ‘revolutionary’ thoughts around self-employment as part of the summer break ‘think’ process.  

Trump
But those thoughts are minor compared with President-elect Donald Trump’s proposals for self-employed people in the USA. According to Forbes magazine and CBSNews,  Trump is going to open the tax floodgate for the self-employed, allowing them to access the 15 per cent tax rate he intends to apply to companies.  More...

Against a backdrop of 'revolutionary' social and political developments in 2016, ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips has posted a new blog which looks at the prospects for the new world of work in the year ahead. Noting the seemingly unstoppable growth of all forms of self-employment, Ken also examines some of the adverse reactions to self-employment and surveys some recent (and quite diverse) academic discussion about the value of 'being your own boss'. You can read Ken's full blog post here. More...

It’s been quite a week on the construction anti-corruption front:  More...

Australians may not know all that much about the Tea Party in the USA. It’s effectively a party within the Republican Party defined as ‘hard right.’ Well, it is campaigning to have the US Tax (IRS) Commissioner impeached by Congress. In 2013, the IRS admitted that it had been targeting for scrutiny Tea Party groups in the 2012 election. Thousands of Tea Party members were targeted with ‘audits, threats and onerous interrogations’ because of their political affiliation.

Corruption or not by the IRS, it does demonstrate the extraordinary power of the instruments of the state. We don’t have a ‘corruption’ problem with the Australian Taxation Office but we did reiterate to Prime Minister Turnbull early this month that the treatment of self-employed people by the ATO is holding back entrepreneurship and innovation. The PM has referred our letter to the Assistant Treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer and we will be talking with her.  More...

ICA Executive Director, Ken Phillips, has penned two recent articles on the related themes of disruption and the politically unpredictable.

The first, on the power and disruptive force of Uber, generated a mixed bag of responses, both friendly and hostile. No surprises there! But Ken's point is that disruption is becoming an increasingly commonplace phenomenon in our lives and we need to learn how to deal with it. More...

As much as they say they love entrepreneurs, politicians’ policies all too frequently damage entrepreneurship.

Here’s the latest update on the USA ‘misclassification’ laws.  More...

President Obama has apologized for the debacle of OmabaCare. In October I made a YouTube commentary  observing that Obamacare had all the indicators of incompetent implementation we had witnessed in Australia under many Labor government programmes. Obama’s $600m website is an administrative disaster. Five million Americans have had their health insurance cancelled. This is proving to be a blow for self-employed entrepreneurs in a big way. More...

 ICA’s Ken Phillips met with the Massachusetts House Small Business Caucus in October 2013 in Boston.  The members are concerned that Massachusetts' anti-independent contractor laws  suppress jobs growth in Massachusetts. More...