October 2, 2021

More Than Half of America's 100 Richest People Exploit Special Trusts to Avoid Estate Taxes

Secret IRS records show billionaires use trusts that let them pass fortunes to their heirs without paying estate tax. Will Congress end a tax shelter that has cost the Treasury untold billions?


by Jeff Ernsthausen, James Bandler, Justin Elliott and Patricia Callahan
Sept. 28, 10:45 a.m. EDT

It’s well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.

There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they’ve been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There’s also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as the grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.



As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

October 1, 2021

Utilities Took Public Money,Gave CEOs Millions,& Then Turned People's Lights Off During the Pandemic

See if your utility is one of the six that made the "Hall of Shame" for worst offenders.

By Molly Taft


A new report finds that some of the country’s most powerful utilities raked in millions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds last year—while continuing to shut off service for households across the U.S. during the pandemic.

The report, released Thursday from the Center for Biological Diversity and BailoutWatch, takes a look at states with publicly available data on utility shutoffs. In the 17 states where there was available data on shutoffs, the report found that the 16 utilities operating in those states cut off electric services for their customers nearly 1 million times between February 2020 and June 2021. (For some context on shutoffs during a normal, non-pandemic year, the U.S. Census found that 1.2 million households in 50 states reported experiencing shutoffs within a three-month period of taking the survey in 2017, the latest Census Bureau data available on disconnections.)

The offenses here are not shared by the utility industry equally; there are especially bad actors. The report highlights six utilities that were responsible for a jaw-dropping 94% of all shutoffs last year. NextEra, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Exelon, and DTE Energy make up what the authors call a “Hall of Shame.” NextEra alone, the report found, accounted for more than half of all shutoffs.

The analysis also examined financial documents, including proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before a company’s shareholder meeting, to calculate how much money these 16 utilities received from the government as part of relief efforts during the pandemic. The CARES Act was originally designed to help struggling businesses pay workers, but utilities took advantage of corporate loopholes within the act that changed how big businesses could report taxes. (The CARES Act also disproportionately benefited oil and gas producers: BailoutWatch, one of the authors of this report, has also used financial documents to show how oil companies laid off thousands of people and yet still gave their CEOs raises during the pandemic, all the while taking handouts from the government.)

https://gizmodo.com/utilities-took-public-money-gave-ceos-millions-and-th-1847769904

October 1, 2021

David Dayen @ddayen: So I read four business books; on the colossus CEOs of our time

https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1443928871758229515











David Dayen bio: is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020) and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud (2016), which earned the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. He was the winner of the 2021 Hillman Prize for excellence in magazine journalism.
https://prospect.org/topics/david-dayen/

October 1, 2021

Survey Finds Disability Service Providers On The Brink

by Michelle Diament | October 1, 2021

Disability service providers across the nation are in crisis, with a majority reporting that they’re shutting down programs, turning away new referrals and struggling to maintain standards.

A survey out this week of 449 organizations that provide services to those with intellectual and developmental disabilities paints a dark picture of the current state of the industry a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of those surveyed, 58% of providers said they’re discontinuing programs or services, 77% are turning away new referrals, 84% are delaying the launch of new offerings and 81% said they are struggling to achieve quality standards. Meanwhile, 40% of providers said they’re seeing higher frequencies of reportable incidents.

“This is the first time since the deinstitutionalization movement that we are actually going backwards,” said Barbara Merrill, CEO of the American Network of Community Options and Resources, or ANCOR. The organization, which represents disability service providers across the nation, conducted the survey during a five-week period starting in August.

https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2021/10/01/survey-finds-disability-service-providers-on-the-brink/29513/