Slashdot Mirror
Restaurant Owners Use Zapper To Cook the Books
Hugh Pickens passes along a NYTimes report on software programs called "zappers," which allow even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners to siphon cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat kept two sets of books. But because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine's memory and changing that record. "...the Canadian province of Quebec may be the world leader in prosecuting zapper cases. Since 1997, zappers have figured in more than 230 investigations, according to the tax collecting body Revenu Québec... In making 713 searches of merchants, Revenu Québec found 31 zapper programs that worked on 13 cash register systems. Only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States... The cash register security industry is focused on protecting patrons and owners from theft by employees, which may be one reason so few zappers are uncovered in the United States. No one hires security experts to protect the government from devious businesses... As hard as zapper software is to detect, it is easy to make, said Jeff Moss, organizer of the annual hacker convention Def Con. 'If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,' he said."
Just one more example of how physical access to a machine can often circumvent any sort of software based security.
Most POS hardware I've seen run Windows. Before that it was OS/2 IIRC.
Why are they running the cash register software in an Administrator login? If they were able to run the software as a limited login, this would prevent most employees from being able to steal from the owners by not being able to run any program if properly configured. We all know if the employee had enough knowledge and alone time with the machine, passwords can be reset, and the zapper program installed/run, but this should subdue most employees with limited IT knowledge.
Anything and Everything about the Net
While an income tax was created during the Civil War, and various income taxes were created after the Civil War, this stopped after 1895, when income taxes were essentially ruled unconstitutional.
The constitutional amendment allowing income taxes was the 16th amendment, ratified in 1913. So, it's technically Taft's fault.
Note: Basically all information in this post comes from Wikipedia.
I have yet to see a modern, touch screen cash register not running Windows. Frankly, I don't understand why they wouldn't be running QNX or Minix, but whatever, I guess the people who deal with these things are too concerned...actually, according to TFA, they are probably glad it is not running a secure OS with tamper evident hardware.
Palm trees and 8
I don't know why you were modded insightful. This ought to have been modded -1 what the hell were you thinking.
The reason why the taxmen are greedy is because they know that a lot of people and businesses cook the books or otherwise defraud the government of taxes. The government spends a certain amount and in order to cover that there needs to be income. Ideally it comes from taxes but particularly in recent years there's a lot which is borrowed via bonds.
Now the problem is that restaurants and businesses which cheat on their taxes, not to mention individuals, get the same benefits that those that pay their share without having to pay all of the money due.
I'm not sure what the exact amount is, but the figure I've seen some fairly large numbers thrown around. I'm not sure what the real number is, I suspect that nobody really does, but it is a significant amount of money due to people like your former employers cheating the other taxpayers.
There are cash registers that run Windows?
The cash registers have to run Wintendo. Otherwise, they can't use Nintendo peripherals such as the Zapper.
The real solution to this problem, the only solution that could ever be enforced, would be a legal requirement that cash registers have temper evident seals and run a OS with verified security (EAL 4+), and signed software. Unfortunately, even a mention of that would get heavy lobbying against, accusations of communist sympathies, etc.
Palm trees and 8
The fact you suggested printing money to cover debts proves you wouldn't be one of those "best and brightest". Can you say rampant inflation? Study economics and history, particularly Weimar Germany. Beyond which, even if it wasn't bad economics it would be a poor idea- using taxes caps government spending by providing a maximum dollar amount, and makes the citizens aware of what it truly costs. These are good things.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Ah, yes, the dirty little secret of small business in America - everybody skims. Everybody. As my dad used to tell me, "If I didn't take cash off the top, I couldn't afford to stay in business. Nobody could. The taxes are too high." It wasn't a matter of wanting to cheat the tax man. It was a matter of survival for him.
I always make a point of paying in cash at local family-owned businesses whenever I can. Times are tough for those folks, and I can assure you that they appreciate a cash transaction.
We use remote systems in our franchise stores (Django-based). Things run in Firefox. Even the touch screen PCs run Firefox full screen mode (and soon to be tablets). Makes deploying new versions a breeze.
Many vendors would issue rebate checks in teh business name if you purchased certain quantities of food and supplies. These rebates never appeared on the invoices.
I would substitute the checks for cash in the daily deposit. Everything balanced and essentially undetectable.
I also would void large guest checks as if I was giving a refund and "refund" the cash to my pocket..
I would "comp" meals to complete strangers and pocket the money.
And I always ate well and never reimbursed my business for it.
If I sold inventory to another restaurant, the money went into my pocket.
So nothing to see here. Move along. Plenty of ways to steal without some damn "zapper". The secret is to never be greedy; greedy people get caught.
This seems thoroughly unsurprising. The higher the tax rate, the higher the incentive to cheat. Quebec has a sales tax rate of 12.875%, which is pretty high by south-of-the-border standards. The top marginal income tax rate in the U.S. from WWII until 1964 was 91%. Does anyone believe that rich people really paid 91% of their income to Uncle Sam? Of course not. They just hired people to find ways to avoid the tax. Action and reaction. Actually, Canada at least has made some efforts to harmonize their tax rates. If states in the U.S. wanted to increase the rate of collection of sales taxes, they would figure out ways of harmonizing their laws, and then it might be more practical to get rid of use tax, which is a joke, and charge the normal sales tax on interstate transactions. As it is, it's crazy. Every state may have dozens of different sales tax rates, and the list of taxable and nontaxable items is different in every state. For a small internet business with customers in all 50 states, it would be a prohibitive amount of work to pay taxes to all the states; you'd have to fill out 50 different annual tax forms, and calculate taxes on according to literally hundreds of local laws and rates. If they did that, they'd level the playing field, which currently treats bricks-and-mortar stores unfairly, and they'd also be able to lower their sales tax rates while still maintaining the same revenue.
Find free books.
I've been asked by two retailers to reduce the amount reported by the point of sale software I was writing. One of them tried to tell me that because he owned the business it wasn't illegal. I told him that I'd just finished writing an enforcement system for Customs and Excise and would he like me to have them contact him to explain the situation?
--
E_NOSIG
Until about 20 years ago, Québec had no sales tax on restaurant meals under a given amount (something on the order of $3.50 -- often, waitresses made two invoices below the cuttoff amount so the client would not be charged taxes). So, light lunches eaten by little worker bees would not be taxed but heavy business lunches eaten by fat executives would be.
Eventually, some very senior bureaucrat very high up in the revenue department became pissed that his premium restaurant food would be taxed and not the lowlives below him in the civil service food chain, so he rescinded the tax exemption for cheaper proletarian meals, which actually failed to bring significant additional revenue, given the extra administrative costs.
This put a bigger burden on smaller restaurants, effectively throwing some out of business, and the non-touristic restauration industry has yet to recover from that downset. So the zapper software came into existence.
Those programs would simply slog through the transactions of the day, discarding most who were paid cash, and had no alcohol (because alcohol sales also have to be tallied precisely).
In a perfect world, all would pay their taxes fairly and the taxes paid would benefit the people as a whole.
In this world, it's not happening. How to fix that? mmmm, simple answer, start all over. Bring the entire political and economic system down and reboot so to speak.
Will that happen? Maybe, maybe not, and certainly not in my lifetime anyways.
But it is what would be required. A clean slate for all, a true bill of rights for human, clearly defined laws which are above any religious practices and a new economy which would be based on that new bills of rights.
What could this bill be made of? the right for all humans to food, water, shelter, education.
What would the economy be like? simple, money as we know it would cease to exist.
As you look upon today's world, could such a goal be achievable? could we actually migrate to such a new system? YES.
How? in stage, obviously, it would take several generations to transit towards such a goal in order for this to be accomplished.
Why? Because many of the new concepts require a relearning of how to live, what to expect, how to interact with others, etc... So, for this to happen, a major part would be in the education that we provide to ourselves and our children, etc.., as they are the ones would continue the process in order to make it happen.
Sounds utopian? Why Not!!
Anything is possible to those who wish it.
How could this be possible? when we (humanity) realize that we are all the same deep down and we all want peace and prosperity, regardless or politics and religious beliefs.
What's the biggest hurdle?
Really the only thing businesses owe goverment for is the use of their currency
And the roads to get suppliers and customers in and out of the place of business. And police to investigate shoplifting, burglary, vandalism, and other crimes that might happen.
In my old country - Brazil - the cash register vendor had, as part of their pitch, the section about how at the end of the day you would flip a switch in the machine and it would invent a whole new day of sales for you up to a specified amount.
I worked on a restaurant that, when closing, would have the manager moving the register to some back room and generating a new day of sales.
This came from the manufacturer. It was not an add-on. And it was easy to do, the manager only had to flip the switch, punch in the amount for the day, and let it rip.
This manufacturer was one big american company that was purchased by a bigger company and then spun off with the same name.
The registers, BTW, were pre-audited by the government team - which clearly wasn't savvy enough to find the switch or had been properly compensated for their blindness.
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised... Though I agree that it is wrong.
It's not that small business owners are natural crooks. They're just doing what they have to do to survive. If every small business owner paid all his taxes, the tax rate would be low. But if you cheat, and skim part of your income, the chances of being caught are practically zero as long as you're halfway careful. So of course, lots of people cheat, which gives them an advantage over their honest competition.
Consequently, the government raises its tax rates to compensate for the reduced revenue because of the cheaters. This puts the honest businesspeople at an even greater disadvantage. They have to start cheating, too, or they'd go out of business. So now we arrive at the present-day situation where every small business owner cheats, the tax rates are ridiculously high, and everyone plays a guessing game trying to figure out the minimum amount of revenue they can get away with reporting to the government.
It's certainly not a desirable situation, but that's how the game has to be played if you want to stay in business. I suspect the amount of revenue collected is roughly equivalent to what would be collected with lower tax rates and a completely honest citizenry. So the net effect is about the same to the government, but the game is fixed from the start.
Evading taxes is stealing money from society, from everyone, the poorest hobo to the richest magnate.
Yes it's immoral, it's also destructive, and that's why it can sometimes warrant imprisonment.
The people aren't, the money is.
Trying to equate taxes with being mugged is pure idiocy.
I used to work with a Windows NT based touch-screen restaurant cash register. I only left that job at the beginning of this year, so I doubt anything has changed. Friends still employed there have informed me that this was still possible as of last week.
While the POS software is running, any presses which might have an effect on system functioning were disabled. Maximize, Minimize, Close, Resize, anything like that was verboten. The lockout, however, was not quite infallibe.
If you rubbed your finger in the lower left hand corner for a few minutes, the start menu would inevitably pop up. It happened very infrequently by accident as well, which was how we happened to discover it.
Once you've got the start menu, things get wonky---you can interact with the start menu in any way requiring a single left click, including starting programs. Once you'd started a program, you could interact with it in the same manner; but the safeguards to prevent you from closing the POS software would also prevent you from closing whatever you'd opened.
More than once, the entire restaurant's transaction processing was shut down when someone either out of curiosity or malice opened, (and I have no idea why they left it installed,) Solitaire.
Management would come in, and find themselves unable to do anything but move cards around on stacks. They couldn't minimize or close it. These registers don't have keyboards or mice, so your only means of interaction is the touch screen. To compound the idiocy, one of the store's four registers was also the server, necessitating that if it were rebooted, every other register would have to be turned off, and only booted up again after the server had finished its boot process.
Which was about fifteen minutes long. And almost invariably involved a panicked call from the home office wanting to know what had gone wrong.
The final nail in the coffin was that the main-server-register, this all-mighty one which must not go down, was in the take-out room---open to customers and utterly ignored by management unless there was a complaint.
Since I'm posting AC, what the Hell: The systems in question were by POSitouch. They're in use in virtually every chain sit-down restaurant I've ever been to in the US, and a solid majority of the sit-down indepedents.
And they're practically a text-book case of what's wrong with using a full version of Windows as the OS on POS equipment.
POS can be interpreted in two ways here, and both of them are accurate.
Your government fella, not mine, people get the government they deserve.
If you don't like it, do something about it, evading taxes is not a valid form of protest unless you are doing so openly.
"Study economics and current events, particularly Zimbabwe"
fixed that for you, weimar germany only printed massive amounts of money to repay war repartitions. modern Zimbabwe is printing massive amounts of 100 billion dollar bills to fund and supply their army which is in a protracted civil war with 2 large militia groups as a result of the African war in the Congo.
what happened in germany is minor compared to what Zimbabwe is doing, which is printing money, buying foreign currency and funding their entire army with foreign currencies. that would be like america going out printing 300 trillion dollars, buying euros, yen, etc from banks around the world and then 'using' that foreign non hyper inflated currency to repay the national debt. (yes i realize the national debt is only 9.65 trillion, but to get enough foreign currencies from foreign banks, at least 300 trillion us dollars would have to be printed, if not a few hundred quadrillion, it would be hard to sucker over banks, after the first few large cash transfers they'd start devaluing the dollar in proportion to the reported sizes of unexpected cash purchases)
eventually, if national debt out strips the pace at which our economy grows, the government is going to start using kooky plans to raise the available funds, however, it's pretty clear that we're in no immediate threat of the government pulling any tricks to try and repay debt. a couple lean decades of economic a serious recession, and continued tax cut and spend politics, and America might be in serious trouble finding enough people to buy their debt. for right now though, things aren't critical. although i find the amount of debt, and deficit growth sickening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
And since purchases must go through only the very small handful of licensed distributors, there's no hiding it.
And as for the people who are saying "If you don't skim you can't stay in business," well, maybe you're right. I went broke.
Years ago, I read a story about a European country, I think it was Italy, mandating the use of state-approved, tamper-proof cash registers in all retail stores. This was due to massive tax fraud at the retail level. Does anyone know if it was successful?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
money as we know it would cease to exist
Money will never cease to exist as long as there is any kind of scarce goods/resource/property or skill that is needed by others. Sure, you can dream of a time when that isn't true, but it will remain a dream.
Still, there are many ways that economy could change in the future. A society can be run where everyone gets paid the same or based on effort put in. It may also be possible to remove common house hold items from the equation, and only require payment for "luxury items". Also, having a society where loans/borrowing is illegal is also possible, although that requires all expensive products (cars, houses) to be leased/rented instead of owned.
Sounds utopian? Why Not!!
Anything is possible to those who wish it.
Yes, too utopian. And no, anything isn't possible.
There is nothing wrong with utopian visions, but aiming towards them and thinking you will reach them with just wishes is the act of a fool.
A good visionaire needs three worlds. One is the utopian world that he wishes for. The second is the nightmare world where everything he implements fails. And the third is the real world where he tries to make progress towards the utopia while avoiding the nightmare scenarios.
Communists as well as libertarians both aim for the utopia while ignoring the nightmares, and that is a recipe for disaster.
Also, make sure that the utopia is actually an utopia that everyone wants. The communist utopia is far to restrained to be called an utopia. It is way too much about individual sacrifice, which is a very non utopian thing in my and many others meaning. I much prefer the social liberalism utopia.
How could this be possible? when we (humanity) realize that we are all the same deep down and we all want peace and prosperity, regardless or politics and religious beliefs.
Yup.
What's the biggest hurdle?
Us the people, which is part being lazy and part resisting and fearing change, and
those who right now, are in power and truly benefit from this unfair world as it is.
I definitly don't agree on laziness. Being lazy is a virtue. It is the lazy people who try to do more with less effort that make the world go forward.
It is the working ants that are satisfied working 40+ hours a week in stressful hierarcical systems, doing unproductive work (bueraucracy, marketing) spending borrowed money on shiny toys (that they only buy because other working marketing ants convince them to do so), while their bosses takes the big profits that are the real problem.
Since the first term of Ronald Reagan, the rich and super-rich have used the Republican party and the religious right to constantly lower their tax rate. Now they pay a significantly less percentage than working people. And that is before all the specialized tax breaks hidden in the 1000-page appropriations bills that no congressman ever reads.
This is never going to change, regardless of who wins what election.
The only way that ordinary people are going to get tax fairness, i.e. the same rates as the super-rich, is to cut corners, zap the books, write in extra kids on their W-2 forms, Yes, to cheat. Have you ever known anyone besides a few limousine-liberals who feel good about paying taxes? Fifty years ago, it was common in the USA.
Not anymore. People realize that they need their money to pay for the things that government used to provide with all the taxes that they take right out of your check. And they're discovering new and creative ways to do protect their money from those who would just give it to Haliburton's permanent endless gravy train.
As the technological elite it would be in our best interest to 'look the other way' when we increasingly find people using technical means to protect their incomes that they need to support their families. If we rat them out, they will hate us. And Haliburton is not going to protect us from their wrath.
On the other hand, if we discover people that are withholding huge sums from the public knowledge, we should use our technical abilities to force them to contribute a reasonable percentage to the public good. These would be people like international drug dealers and other criminals who pay nothing in taxes, either legal taxes or contributions to community charities.
As in so many areas, as the government collapses into insanity or irrelevancy, the burden falls to the us, the technological elite, to decide and enforce the proper balances for the allocation of social resources.
We must do what we can, because we are the only ones with the can-do. This mentality seems weird in 2008, but it will be standard operating procedure in 2028, which is not that far away for most of us.
Thank you,... and be a mensch, stop modding me down to -1, just because you don't like what I say.
what happens when you just go printing money willy-nilly
do you want to pay 100 billion dollars for 3 eggs?
TIAEAE!
When did this become a US-centric federal vs states discussion?
How you organise your government is none of my business, and frankly considering how awful it looks from the outside I have no interest in getting into a discussion about it.
We were talking about taxes as a general concept.
I used to see X terminals for POS systems in places like TGIF and even some small businesses.
I am guessing the reason to use Windows has to do with the fact everyone runs it. Programmers for windows are everywhere and so are windows experts to help with any strange issues the programmers encounter. Sure there are unix programmers but how much do they cost? What about the specialized hardware that pos systems use?
Last windows systems have bad memory management and application conflict issue over time known as Windows rot. POS systems only run 1 app and thats it and they are shut down everynight so no problems can ixist there. A multitasking multiuser os is probably overkill.
http://saveie6.com/
Educated work force, power, phone, a military to avoid invasions, and a government to support free trade.
Yes these are very expensive and roads cost A TON of money. The government pays verizon to put in your phone lines and subsidizes them to a certain extent.
It costs $7,000 per year on average for each school aged child to stay in school. Multiple that by 12?
Without electricity, roads, and a workforce that can read and write you are screwed if you own a business.
Yes taxes are a necessary evil and anyone who uses governmental services needs to pay and corporations need to. I am conservative myself on this issue but realize its unrealistic to have businesses have a free ride when they use government the most.
http://saveie6.com/
Spahs zappin' my cash registah!
Sorry, just got off playing about 2 hours of TF2.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Then who is going to voluntarily pay?
I wouldn't and neither would anyone else. Public goods unfortunately are goods that can't be privatized as if you paid for a military then I wouldn't have to and would enjoy the same benefit.
If you have an issue then you can vote. If you do not like the candidates then get involved in the primaries and form groups to help raise funds with the candidates who agree with you. I read about many libertarians here who like ron paul and I have a feeling your views would probably match his.
http://saveie6.com/
A stupid tax is still a tax equivalent.
Here in Portland, Oregon, one of the major grocery store chains (Fred Meyer, Inc.) has an automated check-out line that has each station running on Windows. I don't know which version but I suspect that it is Win2000. Each station has a laser bar-code scanner for most items. After scanning the item, the user places it in a bag that is on a scale. The weight of each individual grocery item is in the store's data base. When the weight on the scale matches the bar-code, the system prompts the user to scan the next item. There is a touch screen for entering the type of produce by pre-assigned number. For payment there is a credit/debit card reader, a paper-currency scanner, and a coin-weighing unit.
There is a stand-alone PC running Windows for each station and they are connected to a store LAN. Embedded systems like this running Windows on standard PCs is very common. It's easy to develop for this platform. And when it crashes, and it does more than the robust real-time operating systems used on 32-bit microcontroller embedded designs, then the attendant simply opens the cabinet and reboots the PC.
The automatic bottle return machines that read the bar-codes on empties all use Windows. They are constantly crashing.
You don't find Windows running nuclear powerplants, wafer fabs, international bank transfers, or jet airliners. But you find it nearly everywhere else in embedded-systems. Grocery stores find that it's cheaper to throw together a hack job in Visual BASIC and then run it on a few $250 PCs with $50 Windows licenses than it is to pay a programmer $25/hr to write robust code that runs on $8 microcontrollers.
I'm a microcontroller-systems designer and I run into this situation all the time.
This is a bizarre argument (which gives me nostalgic memories of my college freshman all-night bull sessions). But it's important because it gets to the heart of the social contract that we (almost) all agree to, which we recently understand much better because of studies in the evolution of cooperation and in economic experiments in cooperation, like Prisoner's Dilemma. (I recently read a few good articles by Samuel Bowles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) which is why I'm so interested.
If taxes were voluntary, they wouldn't be taxes.
If contributions were voluntary, then freeloaders wouldn't contribute, and would benefit from the contributions of those who do. Cooperation would collapse, and we wouldn't have the advantages of cooperation. We wouldn't have roads, or electricity, or water, or cities.
I know you believe that they could all be produced by entrepreneurs, but if you look at the history of industrialization, you'd see that governments play a major role. Try to find a country with electricity that wasn't promoted by the government or the colonial power.
In fact, try to find a country run by free-market libertarian principles. Afghanistan is the closest I can think of right now, but their GNP is nothing to brag about.
That's because you're a selfish freeloader. That's why we need tax laws that are enforced.
I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to the poor. I think we'd have a more productive economy if we did (look at Finland).
In fact, I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to me.
Depends on what's being "purchased".
Many people see tax evasion as a victimless crime, or are happy to do it because they don't like the government. Others, who may realize it's wrong, justify it by telling themselves that "everyone else is doing it".
Now if you were talking about crimes which we all can agree are immoral - murder, rape, Microsoft, etc - then you'd have a point. But when it comes to tax evasion, EVERYONE has their price.
using taxes caps government spending by providing a maximum dollar amount, and makes the citizens aware of what it truly costs.
You must not live in the U.S.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In the past, dishonest restaurant owners kept two sets of books. Do you imagine police often found that second set? Nope. Isn't today's software component more easily detectable?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
People on welfare (Social Security) do go out to eat.
Yes, and some trade food stamps for cash to buy liquor and some fake disabilities and lots of other things that people who are dependent upon others for their survival shouldn't do. There are also people who barely use the system - taking just enough to survive until they can get off it. They sacrifice their own food so their kids can eat. The point is there's a huge gamut of people using this "government money" - and the person coughing it up has NO CONTROL over which type of person receives the benefit. I don't want someone who is taking money from me to survive to be out at restaurants ordering food. That's what people with disposable income do, people who have extra money to waste. But I very much do want to help support those who are actively working to better their situation. The problem is that I can't trust the government to make sure those people get my money.
People in this country are extremely giving of the money they have left even after the government takes their share. There is NO valid reason to suppose that these extremely giving people would turn callous and cruel if they had 35% more of the money THEY EARNED. Then, the people who actually worked for the money they're giving away can choose who receives the benefits of their largesse, at least in part. But then we probably wouldn't end up with expensive marine biology research centers in Idaho or farmers getting paid to ruin our economy by growing corn for ethanol, etc. If taxes were 1%, maybe I'd support them, but I'm with the Founding Fathers on this one. You remember them, the guys who fought a whole war and started a whole new country over a raise from 1% to 2% direct income tax. We routinely pay 35-40%, and what kind of return do we get? Negligible. Screw that.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Here in Quebec, we have two revenue agencies. Revenu Quebec and Revenu Canada. Talk about redundant work...
They both operate with basically the same texts of laws but somehow, the Quebec agency manages to interpret its texts differently than the same texts in Canada and completely ignores jurisprudence cases stating the contrary.
They are mean terrorists. I run my businesses clean but not because of them; I do it for myself to sleep well at night. I would love to get some of my money back but I'm to darn honest to do it.
As Canada is lowering its tax rate; from 7% to 5% in a few years, Quebec is considering raising its 7.7% tax rate because it is compounded on top of the Canadian rate and they feel they're loosing money when Canada is lowering its tax rate. Idiots...
Several years ago I was young and like most youth of my time; I was a separatist wanting Quebec to become a sovereign Country. Needless to say as I grew older, I realized that without revenue Canada I would be stuck with those morons from revenue Quebec as my only revenue agency. They would be free to terrorize me and my family as they wanted. I switched sides and I've been a Canadian since!
Only one (modified) set of books is required. Cooking the books has probably never been easier considering the widespread use of bookkeeping programs like Quicken, Quickbooks, Simply Accounting, all of which can certainly be cooked without any trace.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
.
"Zappers," or automated sales suppression devices, have brought unheard of efficiencies and economies of scale to a very simple tax fraud - skimming cash sales at point of sale (POS) terminals (electronic cash registers). Until recently the largest tax fraud case in Connecticut, also the "largest computer driven tax-evasion case in the nation," was a zapper case. Stew Leonard's Dairy in Norwalk Connecticut skimmed $17 million in receipts and hid the cash in St. Martin (a Caribbean island).
"I don't cheat on my taxes, and I have to pay more because of the people who do."
That assumes tax rates have a direct relationship to anything other than what those imposing the taxes decide upon.
So you think your government is hoarding your cash and not using it to pay for public services? Tax rates relate to how many pay because government decides not what percentage of peoples wages it wants but how much money they want [to spend on services, etc.].
[oversimplified] All the departments submit their budgets, add it up, get an astronomical sum, go back and tell them to cut it by X%, new sum is Y Trillion. Look at the shortfall versus last years gross tax income, add on a couple of percentage points to fuel, tobacco, low-rate income tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty ... "Bob's your Uncle" ... Y Trillion.
This year, 6% don't pay 50% of their taxes. You borrow and then next year bump all those percentages some more to pay for the 3% shortfall, +loan and maintenance.
In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat kept two sets of books.
Anybody who is halfway decent at book cooking knows you keep three sets of books, not two.
Book 1: Shows you are loosing money, so you don't pay taxes.
Book 2: Shows you are making a lot of money, so the bank will give you a loan, or investors will invest in your company.
Book 3: Shows how much money you are really making.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".