Landlords keep tax-time wheels in motion

The Tax Office releases a list of targets for tax time at this time each year, but a perennial target is property investors. That's because landlords, particularly new landlords, often get their claims wrong and because of the sheer size of the claims made.

Landlords claim about $40 billion in tax deductions each financial year. Property investment is particularly attractive in Australia because of negative gearing. This is where the interest costs on the money borrowed to buy the property investment and other costs of the investment are greater than the rental income.

The shortfall reduces the investor's income on which income tax is paid. Other investments such as shares can be negatively geared, but it is the landlords who receive the lion's share of taxpayer subsidies for their loss-making property investments.

Almost 1.3 million people own at least one investment property. About two-thirds of those, about 867,000 landlords with rental income, report a loss on their investment. For many property investors,We offer the biggest collection of old masters that can be turned into hand painted cleanersydney on canvas. it is a capital gains play - they eventually sell the property for sufficient capital gains to make up for the losses accumulated along the way.

One of the biggest areas where landlords make gains is when they claim expenses for 100 per cent of the year when they are staying in the property for part of the year. This is more likely to occur with holiday-type properties such as those by the beach, where the demand is seasonal. The Tax Office allows deductions on a pro-rata basis for the period the holiday house is genuinely available for rent. Landlords also should be careful not to under-claim their legitimate deductions. One of the biggest areas of under-claiming is depreciation.

Propell National Valuers chief executive Bart Mead says only residential properties built after July 18, 1985, are eligible for depreciation on construction costs. But properties built before this date are eligible for depreciation benefits if major alterations and additions have been made. The list of items that can be depreciated inside and outside a dwelling is extensive, and older properties can benefit from these depreciations.

Mead says decks, extensions, carpets,Of all the equipment in the laundry the oilpaintingreproduction is one of the largest consumers of steam. window treatments, hot-water systems, airconditioning, furniture and pools can depreciate in value in old and new properties. Other claims often overlooked include fees associated with the mortgage. Other deductable expenses are advertising for tenants, agent management fees, body corporate, pest control, cleaning, mortgage interest, land tax and the cost of travel to inspections.

Even as you hit the gym, trying to look respectable in your summer shorts, the junk food in your workplace might be pushing you toward extra pounds. From bags of chips in the vending machines to trays of cookies at meetings, offices have become a calorie minefield. Many of the most health-conscious employees find it daunting to resist the high-calorie treats lurking in the lunchroom and office cubicles.

Changing the culture, though, isnt easy. Its often the candy bar or Dr. Pepper that sustains us when were feeling the stress of scoring a sale or hitting a deadline. And sharing sugary treats often is a way for co-workers to bond.A quality paper cutter or paper partypaymentgateway can make your company's presentation stand out. Our culture is to celebrate office birthdays with cake and ice cream, not with apples, says Lindsay Scherr, president of Endlessly Organic, a South Florida organic buying club. Thats the challenge that employers come up against.

While plenty of employers have hosted health fairs and launched wellness programs, only now are they focusing on workplace eating habits. Businesses are swapping out offerings in vending machines and rethinking meal choices in the company cafeteria. Some even have implemented policies that require healthier food options be served at staff meetings or employee events.

Baptist Health South Florida, one of the areas largest private employers, has been working to change the workplace eating habits of its employees for more than seven years. It started with introducing healthier meals in the cafeteria. Low-fat, low-calorie meals are not only marked as more nutritional, theyre cheaper for employees.

From there, Baptist Health moved on to replacing up to half of the high-fat, salty, and sugary items in vending machines with more nutritional choices. Water has replaced soda as the prominent option in the beverage dispenser and is sold at a lower price point. From time to time the changes are met with grumbles but were not removing choices entirely, were just giving healthy options, says Maribeth Rouseff, who oversees employee-wellness initiatives at Baptist Health.

The hospital system has also brought in produce-buying clubs and onsite farmers markets.Starting today, you can buy these iccard and more from her Victoria. Even more, it has created a policy for what can be served at company meetings (no pizza or chips) and mandates managers use approved vendors who have agreed to abide by the nutrition policy. Most employees understand the personal benefits of the changes, said Rouseff. For every dollar the company spends on wellness, it saves almost $6 in health costs.

Of course, changes are met with some push back. Employees willingly attend onsite health fairs and will even participate in screenings. But wellness directors say they dont dare take the Coca-Cola out of vending machines or remove the office candy bowl.

Employers have found nutritional education plays a big role in how well changes are accepted.Find the best selection of high-quality collectible offshoremerchantaccount available anywhere. Illinois-based Earth Friendly Products started with health days once a year to emphasize nutritional eating but ramped up food education as its workplaces underwent a nutrition overhaul during the past three years. The eco-friendly, cleaning-products company has 250 employees in five divisions, including 26 at its plant in Opa-locka.
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The global economic crisis and South Africa

This old thigh-slapper on how capitalism works will illustrate: Four people go to a restaurant, and three leave through the toilet window. The mug is left with the bill. For the diners who have departed, it is a very efficient way of dining (all you can eat, free); for the mug, and potentially for the restaurant, it is ruinous. Variously, the mug is the investor, the shareholder, or increasingly, the taxpayer, the pension fund.

Many are predicting that the now constant financial crisis means the end of capitalism. I do not share these fears (or for others, such hopes). Capitalism will survive. It is democracy that will have its wings clipped; with it, the European social welfare state.

To use the analogy: the banks invited the governments to dinner and said they could order whatever they wanted. We can guess what happens when you give a politician an a la carte menu and free rein. It suited the banks too. After gorging themselves, the banks discovered their pockets were mostly filled with nothing but expired, plastic cards. They needed to get paid. The politicians had a coronary at the table. The bankers quickly left through the toilet window, the directors so bloated, they could barely squeeze through; a handful got stuck. The restaurant and its staff were left with the bill.

What did the banks do with those sovereign bonds? They used it to plug the hole they blew in the financial system in 2008. In a sense, they have swapped subprime mortgage lenders for countries. Essentially, they leveraged ever more credit to underwrite their unregulated (by the EU treaty) financialisation. We have gone from "too big to fail" to "too big to save".

Newspapers write almost glibly of a trillion ‘stimulus' here (in the USA ending up in currency markets and the like) and a trillion ‘bailout' there (in the USA used for bankers' bonuses, mergers and further acquisitions).

It is worth reminding ourselves what we mean by the shorthand of a "trillion dollars"; it is: $1000000000000. If I gave you ten dollars every second of every minute of every hour of every day, after 3170 years I still wouldn't have finished paying you out $1 trillion.

I accept that a well-structured free market with its hive brain making aggregate conclusions is the most efficient economic tool mankind has ever invented. But the global financial market has ceased to be this. In fact it is hugely unproductive, if not counter-productive. Mobile capital has become an end to itself, and it is staggeringly wasteful.

Banks were meant to facilitate commerce. They are meant to be a service, like water, roads, electricity, telecoms. Banking should never have become an "industry". Instead of serving, they are draining the economy. Solid investment (factories, infrastructure and so forth) has been steadily replaced with silly money (luxury consumerism, real estate bubbles, phoney financial instruments, everything on tick).

A telling example is how often the market no longer reflects the true price of commodities (as determined by return versus risk; supply versus demand). Coffee hit record high levels when there was no increased demand, no drought or fall in crops, in fact when nothing at all had changed in the real world. Investors were parking money is something supposedly more real than the Euro. The results of such speculation can have real world consequences for production and be devastating on the living.

Taxpayers are now expected to pick up the tab for the wealth the financial industries have destroyed in the global markets. Politicians have acted hand in glove with a greedy and incompetent financial elite that has transformed the global market into a piggery, taking no account of present and future costs to society.

The political question now is: should it be the poor, the youth, and the middle class who pay the price for this?

How much choice do they have? It may well be that a country such as Iceland that allowed its banks to fail will come out better and quicker than those who bailed out their banks and saddled future generations with massive debt.

There is no doubt that the Greek government and its bureaucracy has behaved scandalously. But the fact is people have structured their lives (30 years in the EU; 10 years in the Euro) on what they were told and were all too willing to believe. The hardships faced by many vulnerable members of Greek society are real and they are brutal. Successive governments have bribed the electorate. But the central powers of Europe, especially Germany, were eating at that dinner table too.

We should also not make the mistake of equating the various sovereign crises. The world economy is tightly enmeshed, but the reasons in Italy or Spain are not exactly the same for what went wrong in Greece. And what went wrong in ‘socialist' Europe is different in important ways from what has gone wrong in ‘capitalist' USA.

One thing we can be sure of is that South Africa will not be immune. Even China is beginning to show cracks as a result of what is happening in Europe and the USA. The current ANC government - as incoherent as it is in terms of economic policy - does not give one much confidence that it is prepared, either preparing or even capable of responding adequately when the crisis hits, as surely as it will. We need to see a bit more than our finance minister scratching his bald pate.

Of course the ANC government are not alone in being befuddled. In the public arena and our business media there is a deathly, terrible silence surrounding our global financial exposure. Not much more is said other than that Europe is our biggest trading partner (one third of our exports) and so we will be affected badly (among the worst case scenarios, our automobile industry could potentially fail), and a world recession will mean government's present pipe dreams on how it plans to reduce unemployment are doomed.

The Presidency's attitude is all too smug, while tinged with victimhood. The European crisis "is harming the developing world as well, and the developing world did not play any part in causing this crisis," Mac Maharaj said. "Where are we on this matter?"

Could the government please answer their spokesperson's question?

What changes are mooted for current economic policy to ensure we have a buffer against the storm? How are we going to protect our citizens and the most vulnerable when it hits? How exposed are our banks? Since government allowed pension funds to invest overseas (Old Mutual and Liberty Life were the first to move vast amounts outside of South Africa), do we know how solid those investments are? How will the political storm be managed when the jobs promised do not materialise as a world recession, possibly depression, strikes?

This is the time for innovation and creative solutions. Take Belgium for example, where the country's sovereignty is being protected from technocratic intrusion by the citizenry taking up the sovereign debt in government bonds.

Instead, the so-called crisis of capitalism (which is actually even more so a crisis of socialism in Europe) has opened a rhetorical space in the tripartite alliance to roll out failed ideas and disguise excessive spending on a profligate elite. In our crony and monopolistic private sector, South African executive management is following Wall Street, while in the public sector our officials are taking after Kenya (the most overpaid government in the world). We have mayors with six digit salaries. It is an elite hegemony that will sink us as surely as it has sunk economies elsewhere.

The divisive onset of Manguang together with the centenary celebrations of the ANC, do not bode well for a government knuckling down to address the economic recession that will strike in 2012.  Instead, we are to be embroiled in a debate around the merits of capitalism, when it is democracy we should be worried about. Fascist populism only ever thrives under economic hardship; after which it destroys itself together with its country.

Parastatals are a good, because ideologically speaking relatively neutral, example to illustrate the sham capitalist versus dirigiste debate. Whether nationalised or wholly privatised and opened to competition, either way would be better than the chimeras we are currently menaced with. Under Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel the country embarked on the creation of the worst of both worlds - semi-privatised monopolies.

In some cases, we saw initially a marked improvement in customer service levels. In a space of a couple of years, Telkom and the Post Office outlets were portentously transformed into looking like a branch of your local bank.

However, protected by the state from competition, their service charges have rocketed. They are now profit-driven monopolies with hardly a societal conscience. Telkom's exorbitant data charges are literally strangling education in this country, not to mention small businesses. Eskom is off the chart in terms of costs; forcing ordinary consumers to finance its capital projects and subsidise toxic industries like smelters.

(And what will happen down the line when the industries Eskom's ambitious coal plants are promised to power find their goods hit with carbon taxes levied by the importing nations of the world? South Africa will discover its goods are once again uncompetitive. Nothing less than our future economy is at stake here.)

After rendering tens of thousands of people unemployed and dumping them on society's doorstep, trimmed down state-owned enterprises still take huge bailouts, pay dividends to private shareholders and award staggering bonuses to an elite (often politically connected). Sound familiar? I'm thinking of the merchant banks on Wall Street and in London of course.

It is this nexus of power that needs to be broken, whether they are bourgeois capitalist or state owned enterprises.

The real revolutionaries today, the real left, are not our sickeningly obedient Communists (voting for the Protection of State Information Bill even while the workers in the unions are threatening to take Constitutional Court action against it), or our arthritic Trade Unions (ever shrinking as their interests narrow and hurt the unemployed), or the proto-Fascist leaders of the ANC Youth League (cheering for tyrants the world over), or our ossified ANC (looking every bit a hundred years old), but radical democrats, people who demand freedom of speech, accountability and transparency; people like those on Tahrir Square or for that matter on the streets of Athens.

Who better mirrors the free market - the 1% hegemony fortified in Wall Street, or the anarchical, headless, consensual Occupy Movement on Liberty Square? The technocrats huddled in Brussels or the protestors on the streets of Europe?

Our democratic freedoms are our best insurance policy against being hoodwinked.

I would go even further in terms of democratic principle. Our lives are organised around our economic life. It seems logical that democracy needs to start there.

A democratically run company (which includes the workers as well as the shareholders) is far less likely to poison its own community (where the workforce lives) or to up stakes and relocate willy-nilly to Australia because government wants to impose a transaction tax (as British financial companies are threatening to do).

The people should demand a new business model: one that includes the future costs stemming from production (tax breaks, borrowings from future generations, costs to the environment and our health from pollution etcetera). For hidden in the calculation of profit is an ideological position. Business has been allowed to cherry pick the costs for which it will accept responsibility, slip through the toilet window, and dodge the actual bill.

We can simply no longer - if for no reason other than climate change - ignore these costs as we have done in the past. As one economist put it, we have run out of road to kick the can down.

NASA Inspector General Concludes Agency Computers Vulnerable to Cyber-Attacks

There are few large-scale computer systems today that don't – at some point – experience attacks or attempted attacks from hackers. Chances are, if you have a credit card or ATM card, at some point, a merchant has informed you of a breach in their system (and stored personal data) that required you to change your credit card and perhaps take advantage of free credit monitoring service paid for by the merchant.

But let's face it, not all computer networks are created equal. While a breach in T.J. Maxx's network might be inconvenient for many, it's unlikely to get anyone killed. So you'd think critical government agencies, for example, would take better care.

Apparently not.

NASA's inspector general concluded this week that computer servers used by the space agency to control spacecraft were vulnerable to cyber-attack through the Internet, reported AFP.

Sweet, huh?

"We found that computer servers on NASA's agency-wide mission network had high-risk vulnerabilities that were exploitable from the Internet," NASA inspector general Paul Martin said in a report that concluded an audit of NASA's network security. "Specifically, six computer servers associated with IT assets that control spacecraft and contain critical data had vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to take control of or render them unavailable," said the report.

Apparently, a malicious hacker who managed to penetrate the network could use compromised computers to exploit other weaknesses and "severely degrade or cripple NASA's operations."

The inspector general's audit of NASA's computer security reportedly found system-wide holes such as network servers that revealed encryption keys (oops!) encrypted passwords, and user account information.

"These data are sensitive and provide attackers additional ways to gain unauthorized access to NASA networks," the report said.

The inspector general warned that "until NASA addresses these critical deficiencies and improves its IT security practices, the agency is vulnerable to computer incidents that could have a severe to catastrophic effect on agency assets, operations, and personnel."

You'd think they'd be onto this already. In 2009, hackers infected a computer system that supports one of NASA's mission networks. "Due to the inadequate security configurations on the system, the infection caused the computer system to make over 3,000 unauthorized connections to domestic and international Internet Protocol (IP) addresses including addresses in China, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Estonia," recalled the report.

Also in 2009, hackers stole 22 gigabytes of export-restricted data from a computer system at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a federally funded NASA research and development center in Pasadena, California.

The inspector general recommended that NASA immediately act to mitigate risks on Internet-accessible computers on its mission networks and carry out an agency-wide IT security risk assessment.