It makes no mention of evading regulation. This fine is for a failure to retain written communications. Which is impossible to do for some of these communications channels.
Not retaining written comms is evading regulations - "retain written comms" is one, and using Signal/WhatsApp is evading it.
Nobody working in banking is unaware of the written comms rules. Nobody using Signal or WhatsApp in that context is unaware they can't retain written comms. Can you prove intent? Probably not. Is it clear as daylight why this happened? Uh, yes.
And so the SEC hits them where it hurts at least a little bit, in the wallet.
Also, if you pay attention to the banking space... this is pretty much the usual cast of characters. There's absolutely no surprise.
Keep on carrying water for the NSA. We can live in a total surveilace world just by triggering you with "banks are bad."
People use iMessage/Signal/WhatsApp for myriad reasons: some good, some bad. There's no evidence in this case that any of what was said was in furtherance of a crime. The crime they've been fined for is that people--just people--were talking in totally normal communications channels, and their employer has failed to scrape one end of their E2E communications and save it to show to the SEC whenever it asks.
If you are working in banking, you know you are supposed to archive comms. If you then knowingly don't archive, you are deliberately sidestepping existing regulations.
That's a much stronger issue than "if you've got nothing to hide, you don't need secrecy" nonsense that I suppose your NSA comment is supposed to refer to. Nobody is making that argument here.
As for "it's just people talking" - what else do you suppose a "archive all communications" regulation refers to?
And sure there's no evidence. Hence my "can you prove intent" statement. But if it's a regulatory violation that other banks have already been fined for, years ago, and you still sidestep the regulation, there's a strong question why you keep sidestepping it.
If you don't like that, you might not want to work in a space with regulatory oversight.
You support heavy handed and intrusive violation of the privacy of all people who work in the financial sector. You support big brother. Sugar coat it all you want, but you're the one who is cheering on the NSA to de-network encrypted platforms that depend on network effects for our protection
If you think that's what you're talking about, then go actually learn what happened. As it is, you're just being the NSA's "useful idiot" by trumpeting their agenda without realizing what you're supporting.
What do you think we should assume about your communications on encrypted channels? This entire thing is yet another federal effort to criminalize encrypted communications, and it even works on the HN crowd. All they have to say is "big banks bad" and people here go from freedom fighters to government pawns.
This has nothing to do with encryption. Banks are free to encrypt their communications. But they need to keep communication logs and make the plain text available to regulators in certain circumstances.
It's end to end encryption, as in, there are ends on each side where it is decrypted, usually for the humans to read. At the ends the records should have been maintained, the regulations aren't incompatible with E2E.
I'll respond to all three of you: yes it is difficult to retain all potentially work-related communications that take place on your employees' personal devices, so the alternative is to retain all communications.
It is absolutely incompatible with E2E encryption to mandate a third party access to one of the Es for surveillance purposes.
Correct. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp is integrated into any corporate messaging system, so the communication flowing through those apps, is neither archived nor discoverable.
It's still not clickbait. It's an honest headline, and a good one because it draws in the reader as is the point of a headline. Headlines are not supposed to replace the article which seems to be the real problem this thread has. The headline would still not be clickbait if they were fined for using sms and the article said "fined for using sms."
Intuit is a bunch of vampires stealing money from Americans. Every developed country in the world has a relatively easy tax system for citizens, but only the US operates in this insane way where they willingly tax citizens by not providing them with an easy way to do taxes, and instead sends them to the wolves of Intuit and others.
Because elected reps believe that they need to support constituent businesses in addition to constituent people. And those constituent businesses spend more money to ensure they are heard.
I have often wondered if we could split the house in two: one for people and one for industries. This would force transparency and bring the primary issue of double speak and lobbying to the forefront. It would turn them into official cogs in our body politik instead of forcing reps to work and speak in a duality.
Do you expect voters to switch sides of the aisle over this issue? If not, then politicians have no reason not to take industry money. After all, if you have access to all the campaign and other funds without losing voters, then it would be idiotic not to follow the money.
As someone from a country with ludicrously (needlessly) complicated tax law: Unless you have a really complicated situation, you just get a pre-calculated form on a government site you basically just have to look at and approve. That covers about 90%+ of everyone.
>Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee in June proposed a budget rider that would prohibit funds to be used for the IRS to create a government-run tax preparation software, unless approved by a group of House and Senate committees.
>The move “safeguards the IRS from an obvious conflict of interest where the tax collector becomes the tax preparer,” the bill’s summary states.
That doesn’t contradict what I said. Did you uncharitably assume “parties” meant political parties?
Also, per the site guidelines, please don’t make unnecessary accusations that someone has not read the article. Pointing out what the article says is enough—the self-righteousness doesn’t add anything.
Even developing countries! In my shitty country this year I got an email, and 2 days later my tax return money showed up in my bank account. I need to fill out some extra forms to claim my work from home tax benefit, but it's a minimal amount of effort, and it's optional.
Fundamentally if you just pay your taxes, you shouldn't be audited (ideally.) That being said... an increase in auditors is net good because then the IRS can actually audit some of the massive number of tax crimes that occur. This is good.
I was the unfortunate subject of a TCMP/NRP audit. Even with no tax issues identified in the audit, this took over $2K in my representation costs, ran over a year in calendar time, and seemed to exhibit no concern for the wastefulness on either party’s time and money. This was a fairly simple W-2, 1099-B, 401(k) couple of regular workers with a couple kids return.
Based on my experience, I’m not in favor of this expansion.
The TCMP audits are not about finding money--by that standard they are incredibly wasteful. Rather, they are about investigating how honest people are being and in what ways they are being dishonest.
I believe the answer to TCMP audits is to have the IRS pay you an appreciable amount if no substantial issues come to light as they are an unreasonable burden to those who get selected.
The tax code is incredibly complex, which means unless your tax filing is trivial, you likely have misfiled.
The Secretary of the Treasury (not current one) was found to have misfiled his return. When asked, all he could say was he put the numbers into Turbo Tax, and this is what it spit out.
I have a family member who gets audited by the IRS every year. They've never found anything, but the harrassment continues year after year.
Once the IRS has these additional people, they will have to use them, and they will have to justify them.
The thing is that's not designed to get the most amount of dollars - which is pretty moronic. This is just measuring the wrong thing. We should do the least work to get the most dollars.
We had a class action lawsuit before and what did it get:
1) hundreds of millions for corporate lawyers
2) almost nothing for everyone else
Without functional market dynamics (ie actual competition), the class actual lawsuit doesn't actually influence Experience etc to do anything because they will always own the market, so they can continue to fuck people forever.
>the class actual lawsuit doesn't actually influence Experience etc to do anything because they will always own the market
except as you admitted yourself, they had to pay "hundreds of millions for corporate lawyers." That seems at least somewhat of an incentive to step up security.
Yeah but "hundreds of millions" can buy a lot of cybersecurity consultants. The shoplifting loss from a single store probably doesn't make much of a dent in a S&P 500 retailer's profit either, but they still spend money on loss prevention because it saves money on net.
The Equifax class action lawsuit required you to fill out a form. Half a year later, they required you to fill out another form and then mail something in. If you forgot at any point, you'd not be entitled to your paltry settlement.
