Summer high: Molson Coors' JV Truss launches 6 pot-infused drinks in Canada

ONLY IN CANADA YOU SAY, PITY*

(Reuters) - Miller Lite beer-maker Molson Coors Beverage Co's cannabis joint venture Truss Beverage Co on Wednesday launched six pot-infused beverages in Canada, as it hopes that summer demand will offset recent sales hits from COVID-19 lockdowns.

Coronavirus restrictions in major provinces including Ontario have forced weed stores to shut for extended periods, and are expected to hit cannabis companies' results for the March quarter.

The summer season, which tends to represent peak demand for beverages, will be crucial for companies to undo the damage.

Truss, jointly run by Canadian pot producer Hexo Corp, launched five CBD-infused beverage brands in August last year and claims to have already won a 43% market share in the category in Canada. https://bit.ly/3wThh2D

"Summer ... is the biggest opportunity for the beverage category; it is the inflection point for consumers to try out our products," Truss Beverage's Chief Executive Scott Cooper told Reuters in an interview.

"Cannabis-infused beverages are still new and tend to be an impulsive purchase, so having the store open is important to the trial and awareness of the category," he added.

Truss said its latest beverage line included watermelon, lemonade, sparkling tonic and honey green iced tea flavors, and are expected to be rolled out to retailers over the next few months.

*MOTTO OF THE RED ROSE TEA COMPANY OF CANADA

Ford's first VW-platform electric car is a small SUV, report says

Andrew Krok 

Vehicle development takes a pretty long time, which is why it came as no surprise when we didn't really hear much after Volkswagen and Ford announced a platform-sharing partnership that would see the American automaker using the German company's MEB scalable electric-vehicle platform. While official news has yet to land about the fruits of their partnership, a new report gives us an idea of what to expect in the near future.

© Provided by Roadshow Ford's Cologne facility is currently undergoing a $1 billion renovation to shift its focus to electrified vehicles. Oliver Berg/AFP/Getty Images

Ford's first use of VW's MEB platform will spawn a small SUV, Autocar reported Monday, after sighting what it believes to be the vehicle in question. Representatives for Ford did not immediately return a request for comment, Volkswagen declined to comment, and neither automaker provided comment for Autocar's report.

Pictures published by Autocar show a vehicle wrapped in a blue cover, with only a hint of its styling revealed on the lower portion of the car. Based on its color, it could be a full-size clay model, but since automakers routinely decline to discuss future vehicles until the time and date of their choosing, answers will likely be hard to come by until Ford delivers more information on its efforts, which Autocar understands will happen later this year. The report says that Ford will build this MEB-based EV at its factory in Cologne, Germany, which is currently being renovated specifically to produce future electrified vehicles.

Ford's Cologne facility is currently undergoing a $1 billion renovation to shift its focus to electrified vehicles.

Given its size relative to the workers standing by it in Autocar's photos, this small SUV looks to slot beneath the Mustang Mach-E and would likely be analogous to VW's own ID4, which relies on the same MEB platform.

Rumors of a Ford and VW partnership first surfaced in 2018, and the two automakers chose the Detroit Auto Show to announce their joint venture, which at first was limited to midsize pickup trucks and commercial vans . Later that year, VW announced it would invest $2.6 billion in Argo AI and allow Ford to use its MEB EV platform for future vehicle development. It's all part of Ford's plan to go entirely electric in Europe by 2030, including commercial segments.

Canada's Northland Power buys Spanish wind farms and solar park

MADRID (Reuters) -Northland Power has made its first foray into Spain's fast-growing renewable energy generation market with a deal to buy a portfolio of wind farms and solar parks, the Canadian company said on Wednesday.

A wave of global targets to cut carbon emissions are stoking investor interest in renewable energy businesses, and Spain's sunny plains, windy hillsides and political enthusiasm for the sector have made it a focus for the market in Europe.

Northland Power said in a statement it will pay 345 million euros ($413.3 million) in cash for the assets, which are located across Spain, and take on 716 million euros in debt.

The seller is an investment fund set up by asset manager Plenium and Bankinter.

Santander advised Northland on the transaction, a spokesman for the bank said.

The solar and wind parks in question were built under a previous regulatory regime, which fixes the returns the owners receive for their output for an average of 13 years across the portfolio. ($1 = 0.8347 euros)

(Reporting by Isla Binnie; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Alistair Bell)

Revenge: Spectrum Workers on Strike Build Their Own ISP

Whitney Kimball 
4/14/2021`

If, for any number of reasons, you’d like to burn telecoms to the ground and build a new internet service provider on their smoldering remains, good news for you. New York City Spectrum workers, who’ve weathered an anguishing four-year strike, have built their own internet service provider. If the city throws its support behind it, People’s Choice Communications could liberate New Yorkers from cable gangsters once and for all.

© Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)

The city itself is almost constantly fighting Spectrum. With its rise to dominance in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has tried to evict it; attorneys general had to chase it around for allegedly defrauding 2.2 million New York customers; and the company was accused of putting employees in harm’s way just one month into the pandemic. Unionized Spectrum workers just hit the four-year anniversary of their strike, during which time Spectrum’s parent company Charter made its CEO the third-highest-compensated executive in America.


The Spectrum workers behind the co-op, members of IBEW Local 3, have been on strike practically since Charter showed up in 2016 and bought Time Warner. Workers have said that the company showed no interest in good faith bargaining over the contract it inherited, attempting to jettison pensions and health insurance. “Their goal was to try to eliminate the union, and we could see that from the first time they came to the bargaining table,” survey technician, striker, and IBEW Local 3 steward Troy Walcott told Gizmodo. “They presented us with an offer that was impossible for us to accept.”

Walcott told Gizmodo that, while some have been forced to go back to Spectrum, about 1,200 of the 1,800 strikers are still holding the line and making ends meet with odd jobs. Walcott said that people are still losing homes, and the strain has broken up families, while media attention has dissipated. “Everybody kind of looks past it,” he said. “We’re kind of a ghost in the city.”

After attempting to convince the city to establish a municipal network, organizers turned to the idea of a cooperatively owned model, the kind of radical concept recently in the realm of activist dreams. Workers co-own the company; the building residents own the network; the C-Suite doesn’t extract a cent. Residents pay for the installation fee in monthly increments, which organizers believe might range from $300-$400 per apartment. But residents cover the cost similar to a mortgage, in monthly payments of around $10-$20, which also covers service.

By comparison, Spectrum’s lowest-priced offering is $50, with packages going up to $150—which represents over a quarter of a public housing resident’s monthly rent.

People’s Choice operates light, scalable infrastructure. The fixed wireless network is enabled by a “mesh network”: antennas are installed on individual buildings, which receive a wireless signal from the co-op’s central hub. Building residents then connect routers via ethernet cables and operate as normal.

Sascha Meinrath, a mesh network pioneer who helped architect People’s Choice, compared the system to a spider web. In the event of a link break, building antennas can connect and reroute through each other, reducing the likelihood of large-scale outages.

The co-op makes a radical proposal in the business structure itself. Parsing out the network to customers and the ISP company to workers implies that both groups get an equal share of bargaining power. Customers who own the infrastructure will be promised the option to bring in a new service provider; the reverse is true for workers, who can pull their services. “It means people will have to collaborate, and I think that’s really interesting,” Meinrath told Gizmodo. “It means that you’re going to pay fair wages,” he said. “It means that customer service is going to be really important.”

“This is not a charity,” Meinrath added. “This is a sustainable social enterprise.”

It also means that speeds get faster and service gets cheaper as more customers sign-on. “Once you get critical mass of people, you will be able to buy more bandwidth in bulk, which drops the cost per megabit dramatically,” Meinrath said. “By dramatically, I mean, it can drop by multiple orders of magnitude. The difference between one and two gigs is very different than the difference between ten and one hundred gigs. It’s remarkable how cheap bandwidth gets when you buy it in bulk.”

They still haven’t worked out all the costs, but they’ll certainly offer a better return on any co-owners’ investment. We rarely get a hard metric to define how much telecoms are charging through the nose, but a 2015 investigation found that Comcast was pocketing 97 percent profit margins. Co-ownership necessitates transparency. The money left over from anticipated minimal monthly payments is meant to fund community services and payback co-owners in dividends.

“Having ownership of something as big as a cable system is definitely going to be a game-changer in the community that we’re serving,” Troy Walcott said.

While a relatively small number of people are currently using the system, People’s Choice claims that it already has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of Bronx residents.

“We have a big portion of most of the Bronx covered with our antenna,” Walcott said. “Now we have to go building by building to let people know we’re out there and start turning them on.” (You can reach out and ask for service here.) A few dozen Spectrum strikers have been actively involved in the installations, but Walcott expects that at least one hundred workers are waiting in the wings for the project to scale up.

Walcott says that they’re equipped to hit a minimum speed of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload, the requirement to legally qualify as a broadband connection.

Spectrum’s “low-income internet” offering is 30 megabits per second, though the company qualifies this with the disclaimer that “wireless speeds may vary.” (Spectrum is not known for transparency, and in 2018, it settled for $174.2 million with the state for alleged lies.) Co-op organizers say that speeds for the customers online are now much higher than Spectrum’s minimum average due to the low customer base, but they hope that as they scale up People’s Choice can reach a minimum download speed of 50 megabits per second.

“Up until this past year, this idea of creating mesh networks, or fixed wireless networks, was basically something that only like anarchist nerds did, speaking as an anarchist nerd myself,” Erik Forman told Gizmodo. Forman is the education director for the Platform Cooperation Consortium, a coalition that envisions worker-owned alternatives to major tech platforms (one example of that effort is a worker-owned alternative to Uber). He describes himself as a “co-op developer.” Forman says People’s Choice was mostly built by sweat equity, with grants from partners Metro IAF, a nonprofit affordable housing developer, and BlocPower, a renewable energy startup. Brooklyn Law School’s tech clinic, BLIP, chipped in with administrative support, Forman said.

Forman says he’s been mulling over the idea of worker-owned co-ops since he attempted a unionization effort at Starbucks years ago. “A lot of people I’ve met in the restaurant industry would say their dream was to own their own restaurant someday,” he said. “So I started thinking, well, what if we direct our energies not just to unionize the employers, but to abolishing them and to putting the production under worker ownership?”

The city now has to decide whether to take Spectrum strikers up on that bid. New York City is now soliciting proposals for affordable wireless networks for underserved areas like NYCHA housing. At the time of publishing, Gizmodo was unable to immediately reach a city administrator for comment on whether it plans to consider their proposal.

Even a relatively small initial investment could propel the network into self-sustaining momentum. “With significant funding upfront, we can go after a thousand people from day one,” Meinrath said. The alternative is recruiting batches of 100 customers who have to bear higher up-front expenses for things like individual pieces of equipment that could be bulk ordered at a much lower cost.

In other words, it seems that without some help, the future is uncertain. Good service isn’t fully guaranteed yet (not that it is anywhere, now). They might have some issues with scaling, and it’s unclear if the nascent cooperative will be able to sustain employees full-time. But the fact that you’re paying down the installation with a cheap monthly bill offers little risk to people who want to try it.

And at this point, the city has scant excuse to reject a bold worker-led and coalition-backed alternative. “I know that the city is thinking outside the box on a lot of business models behind this,” Meinrath said. “The open question is whether they are then putting their money where their mouth is.”

Customers who can afford to pay Spectrum’s exorbitant rates have been sort of stuck with the company. As In These Times reported back in February 2020, the city ominously hinted that it would renew Spectrum’s franchise agreement, which is protected by federal law. The state only gets an out in “especially egregious cases.”

Gizmodo has reached out to Spectrum and will update the post if we hear back.

People’s Choice prioritizes the Bronx, a borough specifically left with an utter dearth of Spectrum service. As of November 2020, the New York City comptroller’s office estimated that 100,000 students were still entirely without internet service. Just a few months into the outbreak of the pandemic, the company petitioned the FCC to impose data caps, artificial limits on internet usage in order to charge more. Thousands of published Better Business Bureau complaints in the New York metropolitan area report service outages, surprise bills for unused service, and massive price hikes.

“Big telecoms are more interested in making fifty to a hundred dollars a month serving people on the Upper East Side than they are in the Bronx,” Forman told Gizmodo. “It would be an utter outrage if the city gave a single cent of taxpayer dollars to Spectrum after what’s done in the past four years.”

UPDATE
Interactions between early modern humans and Neanderthals were a lot more common than we thought

By Ashley Strickland, CNN 

4/14/2021


The Neanderthal DNA in East Asians today can be traced back to interactions between Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe 45,000 years ago.

© Nikolay Zaheriev, MPI-EVA Leipzig This is the entrance to the Bacho Kiro Cave. Excavations have occurred just inside the entrance and to the left.

The oldest known remains of modern humans in Europe have been identified in the Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria, according to new research published last week in the journal Nature.

These remains, which belong to five individuals, were radiocarbon dated between 42,580 and 45,930 years ago. Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago.

By analyzing the ancient genomes from the Bacho Kiro remains, researchers were able to determine their relation to humans today, as well as the complexity of populations as humans migrated from Africa to Eurasia thousands of years ago.


Human ancestors

The three oldest of the individuals whose remains were found in the cave are most closely connected to current populations in East and Central Asia as well as the Americas. Their genomes revealed between 3% and 3.8% of Neanderthal DNA. In decoding the genetic material researchers concluded that the individuals had Neanderthal ancestors five to seven generations back across their family histories.

© Marek Jantač The skull of a modern human female individual from Zlatý kůň.

"These individuals represent an early expansion of modern humans into Europe that was previously unknown in the genetic record, with implications for the broader out-of-Africa expansion," said Mateja Hajdinjak, study author and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow within the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in England.

"Crucially, the genomes of Bacho Kiro Cave individuals point out that the early human groups in Europe commonly mixed with Neanderthals."

The researchers believe that mixing between modern humans and Neanderthals was much more common than they had previously thought, especially when the first modern humans arrived on the scene in Europe.

© Tsenka Tsanova, MPI-EVA Leipzig Human bones have been recovered from the cave along with stone tools, animal bones, bone tools and pendants.

"They may even have become absorbed into resident Neandertal populations. Only later on did larger modern human groups arrive and replace the Neandertals," said Svante Pääbo, study coauthor and Director for the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, in a statement.

Remains of four of these individuals were found together with stone tools linked to the Initial Upper Paleolithic Era, or the earliest known stone tool culture that is associated with modern humans in Eurasia. The Upper Paleolithic began about 40,000 years ago.

These stone tools, along with personal ornaments made from animal teeth recovered from the cave, are similar to those found across Eurasia.

A fifth individual found in the cave, dated to about 35,000 years ago, was found to belong to a group that's genetically distinct from the others and belonged to a different population.

"This shifted our previous understanding of early human migrations into Europe in a way that it showed how even the earliest history of modern humans in Europe may have been tumultuous and involved population replacements," Hajdinjak said.

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The Bacho Kiro Cave was first excavated by archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in 1938 with later excavations occurring in the 1970s. Researchers revisited and excavated the cave in 2015, investigating a layer that was rich with thousands of animal bones, tools made from stone and bones, pendants, beads, and the fragmented remains from five Homo sapiens.

Hajdinjak said the next steps would be accessing genomic data from other sites that are associated with the Initial Upper Paleolithic across Eurasia.

"The emerging picture of early human groups shortly after out-of-Africa migration is a complex one, and it would be amazing to see if this archaeological culture found across vast geographical area (spanning from East Europe to Mongolia) is made by different human groups, how they relate to each other, and importantly how they relate to resident archaic groups," she said via email.


A different population

More research released last week shed light on another population of early modern humans.

A skull recovered in the Czech Republic belonged to one of the earliest modern human populations in Eurasia that stemmed from migrations out of Africa.

The skull was found at the Zlatý kůň site and belonged to a woman who carried 3% Neanderthal ancestry. Her group in Eurasia did not contribute genetically to later populations in Europe or Asia. This is likely the oldest reconstructed modern human genome to date.

Efforts to secure radiocarbon dating of the skull failed due to collagen contamination from cattle, likely animal glue used to preserve parts of the skull in the past century. However, Neanderthal segments within the genome suggest that the skull may have be older than 45,000 years.

Parts of the skull were first recovered in 1950. Researchers initially thought it was only 15,000 years old.



"We have found out that the Zlatý kůň woman belonged to group of modern humans that were among the first to settle in Europe after modern humans left Africa more than 50,000 years ago," said Kay Prüfer, co-lead author of a study that published last week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Prüfer is also the group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The Zlatý kůň woman belonged to a separate lineage of non-Africans that went extinct later on, Prüfer said. She represents a population that formed in the dawn before ancestors of those in modern-day Europe and Asia split apart.

Previous research has suggested that modern humans had already migrated to southeastern Europe between 43,000 and 47,000 years ago, but the fossil record has been lacking support for this.

This finding, together with the Bacho Kiro Cave individuals, suggests an intriguing theory.

"It is possible that Europe was settled by two different groups of modern humans in the time before 45,000 years," Prüfer said. "The Bacho Kiro and Zlatý kůň finds tell us different pieces of the story of how Europe was first settled, but we do not know how the groups represented by these individuals were related. That is a clear next question for us to answer."

How scientists found 'Nemo,' Australia's newest dancing spider

Justin Meneguzzi 
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

4/14/2021

  

© Photograph by Joseph Schubert 'Maratus nemo the Nemo Peacock Spider standing on the surface of a leaf'.

In a wetland near South Australia’s Mount Gambier, Sheryl Holliday crouched in ankle-deep water, camera lens trained on blooming purple orchids a few feet away. Just as Holliday prepared to hit the shutter, she caught a glimpse of something tiny jumping out of the frame.

She didn’t know it on that clear day in November, but she’d just discovered an entirely new species of peacock spider, a group of little-known Australian jumping spiders known for vibrant colors and elaborate mating dances.

“I’ve been chasing peacock spiders for three or four years,” says Holliday, an ecological field officer for Nature Glenelg Trust and citizen scientist, but this one looked different. For one, its abdomen was drab, and the creature had distinctive orange-and-white facial patterns.

Intrigued, Sheryl shared her photos to a Facebook peacock spider appreciation page, which caught the attention of page administrator and arachnologist, Joseph Schubert, who had never seen one like it before.

The pair connected, and Holliday collected and sent live specimens to Melbourne, allowing Schubert and colleagues to formally identify the arachnid as Maratus nemo, after Nemo, Disney’s heroic clownfish. (The Walt Disney Company is majority owner of National Geographic Partners.)

The Nemo peacock spider, described recently in the journal Evolutionary Systematics, is the latest in a flurry of peacock spider discoveries that has brought their known numbers from just 15 in 2011 to 92 today.

Schubert, a biologist at Museums Victoria, credits the boom to the ease of modern photography, in which anyone can quickly take a photo on their smartphone and upload their findings to social media.

Of course, being popular also helps. These rice grain-size arachnids’ charming mating dance has led to countless viral memes that have made the peacock spider an internet sensation.

Movers and shakers

That doesn’t mean they’re easy to find. Most of the year, peacock spiders are brown; only males gain their striking colors after they molt in the spring. Combine that with their diminutive size, and it’s no surprise studying the non-venomous arachnids can be a challenge.

That’s why, when identifying a new species, Schubert hones in on the male’s colorations as well as their mating dance, which is unique to each species and involves a male flexing and gyrating to show off its fitness. When Schubert encouraged a male Nemo to dance for a female in the lab, he was surprised by what he found.

This one individual didn’t “lift its abdomen completely like other species, and it doesn’t have those opisthosoma flaps”—which give the spider its famous colorful display—"underneath the abdomen. It’s just got a little brown booty,” explains Schubert.

Instead, the male impressed the female by raising its third set of legs and vibrating its abdomen on the ground, generating an audible sound. It’s unknown, he says, whether this is a trademark dance of the Nemo peacock spider.

Schubert noted Nemo’s wetland home is also “really strange,” as the majority of other known peacock spiders prefer dry scrublands.

But peacock spiders are always surprising him. In 2020, scientists found one species, Maratus volpei, living in a salt lake. “We’ve learned that we should be more open to the sorts of habitats where we look for peacock spiders,” Schubert says.

Though peacock spiders play a valuable function as a predator controlling insect populations, there’s still far too little known about their role in the ecosystem and conservation status, he adds.
A tangled web

“Peacock spiders are excellent because they challenge the prevailing view of spiders as being big, hairy, and dangerous,” says Michael Rix, principal curator of arachnology and research fellow at Australia’s Queensland Museum, who was not involved in Schubert’s study.

“This is a really excellent example of just how interesting, diverse, and still understudied the Australian spider fauna is,” Rix says.

Only around 30 percent of Australia’s invertebrates have been formally documented, and there could be as many as 15,000 spider species still to be identified.

Discovering new spiders can also benefit humankind, whether it’s controlling agricultural pests or inspiring new medical treatments, Rix says. Proteins from funnel-web spider venom are already being used to develop pain relief medication, as well as treatments for epilepsy, stroke, and potentially some cancers.

Meanwhile, arachnid and insect populations are plummeting worldwide. In Australia, habitat loss, wildfires, and pesticides may kill off entire spider species before we’ve had a chance to find them, Rix cautions.

“Fundamentally, we can't conserve our biodiversity for future generations,” he says, “if we don't know it even exists.”

MIT scientists translated spider webs into music. It could help us talk to them

By David Williams, CNN 

4/14/2021

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have turned spider webs into music -- creating an eerie soundtrack that could help them better understand how the arachnids spin their complex creations and even how they communicate.

© From Isabelle Su and Markus Buehler/ACS Cross-sectional images (shown in different colors) of a spider web were combined into this 3D image and translated into music. Credit: Isabelle Su and Markus Buehler

The MIT team worked with Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno to take two-dimensional laser scans of a spider web, which were stitched together and converted into a mathematical model that could recreate the web in 3D in virtual reality. They also worked with MIT's music department to create the harplike virtual instrument.

"Even though the web looks really random, there actually are a lot of internal structures and you can visualize them and you can look at them, but it's really hard to grasp for the human imagination or human brain to understand all these structural details," said MIT engineering professor Markus Buehler, who presented the work on Monday at a virtual meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Listening to the music while moving through the VR spider web lets you see and hear these structural changes and gives a better idea of how spiders see the world, he told CNN.

"Spiders have very keen vibrational sensors, they use vibrations as a way to orient themselves, to communicate with other spiders and so the idea of thinking literally like a spider would experience the world was something that was very obvious to us as spider material scientists," Buehler said.

Spiders are able to build their webs without scaffolding or supports, so having a better idea of how they work could lead to the development of advanced new 3D printing techniques, he said.

They scanned the web while the spider was building it and Buehler compared it to a stringed instrument that changes as the structure becomes more complex.

"While you're playing the guitar, suddenly you're going to have new strings appear and emerge and grow," he said.

Buehler said they've recorded the vibrations spiders create during different activities, such as building a web, courtship signals and communicating with other spiders, and are using artificial intelligence to create synthetic versions.

"We're beginning to perhaps be able to speak the language of a spider," he said. "The hope is that we can then play these back to the web structure to enhance the ability to communicate with the spider and perhaps induce the spider to act in a certain way, to respond to the signals in a certain way."

He said that work is still in progress and that they've had to shut down their lab because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Buehler has been interested in the connection between music and materials on the molecular level for years and has used similar techniques to show the subtle differences between the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and between two different variants of the Covid-19 virus (you'll hear one through your left speaker and the other through the right).

In addition to the scientific value, Buehler said the webs are musically interesting and that you can hear the melodies the spider creates during construction.

"It's unusual and eerie and scary, but ultimately beautiful," he said.

Members of the team have done live musical performances by playing and manipulating the VR web, while musicians jam along on human instruments.

"The reason why I did that is I wanted to be able to transfer information really from the spider perspective, which is very atonal and weird and spooky, if you wish, to something that is more human," Buehler said.

IRS Failed to Collect $2.4 Billion in Taxes From Millionaires: Report

Yuval Rosenberg
March 15, 2021·


The Internal Revenue Service has failed to collect more than $38.5 billion from taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year — and more than $2.4 billion from taxpayers with incomes over $1.5 million, according to a new report from a Treasury Department watchdog highlighted by Bloomberg News.

Bloomberg’s Laura Davison reports:

“Auditors were only able to recoup about 39% of the more than $4 billion in unpaid taxes owed by a group of rich taxpayers with an average annual income of nearly $1.6 million, the report found. The findings suggest that the IRS should place more emphasis on a taxpayer’s income when determining whether to pursue an audit case, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in the report released Monday. …

“The findings are the latest in a series of government accountability reports that recommend the IRS do more to pursue high-income taxpayers after audit rates dipped to historic lows in recent years. The dearth of examinations has prompted Democrats in Congress to pursue legislation that would mandate higher audit levels of businesses and wealthy individuals.”

The watchdog report made seven recommendations that it said could help the IRS improve collection from wealthy taxpayers. It suggested, for example, that the agency could use income information to better identify taxpayers who can pay their delinquent taxes. The report found that many high earners owe little relative to their incomes, but said that the IRS does not prioritize income when deciding which cases to pursue, instead placing more significance on factors such as the dollar amount of the balance owed. “It is the IRS’s belief that it is effectively addressing noncompliance by high-income individuals by focusing on the size of the amounts owed,” the report said. “As subsequently shown, this assumption is faulty.”

IRS management agreed with just two of the seven recommendations but said it plans to evaluate its models and consider additional income factors to improve its ability to predict recovery of delinquent taxes.

IRS is probing the dark web to look for cryptocurrency and NFT tax evasion, says IRS commissioner

Robert Frank 
CNBC

4/14/2021

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said the U.S. fails to collect as much as $1 trillion in taxes owed each year, partially due to the explosion of cryptocurrencies.

The crypto world "is replicating itself constantly," Rettig said, who cited NFTs as an example.

Many NFT buyers are not aware that they have to pay a capital gains tax when they use appreciated crypto to make a purchase.

© Provided by CNBC

Tax evasion using cryptocurrencies is "replicating" with nonfungible tokens and other new crypto-related products, according to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Rettig said Tuesday the U.S. fails to collect as much as $1 trillion in taxes owed each year in part due to the explosion in cryptocurrencies, which are difficult for the agency to track and tax.

Rettig said the crypto economy — now valued at over $2 trillion globally — continues to expand, specifically mentioning NFTs, as an example.

"So now we have these nonfungible tokens, which are essentially collectibles in the crypto world," Rettig said. "These are not visible items by design. The crypto world is not visible."

"In the criminal context, the IRS criminal investigations, cybercrime unit has been spectacular operating in the dark web, engaging with cryptocurrency-related transactions," Rettig added.

Answering a question from Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio — who said he is working on a bill to require more reporting and disclosure around crypto transactions — Rettig noted that "absolutely, reporting with respect to cryptocurrencies would be important."

Cryptocurrencies are taxed by the IRS as capital assets, not currencies. Thus, holders of the cryptocurrency are required to pay capital gains taxes if they sell their crypto for a profit or use it for a purchase. Tax experts say many crypto holders are either unaware of the requirement or avoiding the tax.

Platforms such as Coinbase — which fought an IRS request for customer data in 2016 — now report some customer information to the IRS. But tax experts say clearer government regulation is needed to require more taxpayer disclosure.

As a sign of how important crypto tax evasion has become to the IRS, the agency added a question to the top of the Form 1040 — the main income and tax reporting form — asking: "At any time during 2020, did you receive, sell, send, exchange or otherwise acquire any financial interest in virtual currency?"

NFTs have also exploded in value and popularity in recent months, raising a whole new set of tax questions.

NFT sales topped $2 billion in the first quarter in the platforms tracked by NonFungible.com. Although NFTs are purchased with crypto — usually ether — many U.S. NFT buyers are not aware they have to pay a capital gains tax when they use appreciated crypto to make a purchase.

Poll: Majority say higher income Americans should pay more in taxes

Gabriela Schulte 

THE HILL 

4/14/2021

A majority of voters believe higher-earning Americans should pay more in taxes, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.

© iStock Poll: Majority say higher income Americans should pay more in taxes

Fifty-four percent of registered voters in an April 9-12 survey said high-income earners should pay more in taxes while 8 percent said they should pay less and 38 percent said they already pay their fair share.

Eight percent of respondents said middle-income earners should pay more, 32 percent said they should pay less and 60 percent said they pay their fair share.

Nine percent of voters said low-income earners said they should pay more, 54 percent said they should pay less while 37 percent said they pay their fair share.

© Provided by The Hill

Seventy percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents said higher-earning Americans should pay more in taxes while 53 percent of Republicans said the wealthy pay their fair share.

An April 9-12 Hill-HarrisX survey found a plurality of voters, 46 percent, said the U.S. does not do enough to redistribute wealth.

According to a recent report, the top 1 percent of households per income do not report 21 percent of their income to the IRS while the bottom half of earners fail to report about 7 percent of their income.

The Hill-HarrisX poll was conducted online among 2,813 registered voters. It has a margin of error of 1.85 percentage points.

-Gabriela Schulte