Remind me what happens to a US citizen if our personal finances "struggle with fraud" and unaccountability to the tune of 40% when it comes to the IRS?
Oxfam attempted to add up all the numbers in various PDFs linked on the World Bank's website and got a total that's less than the headline figure in the World Bank's press releases. (See the actual report at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...)
Some of that is probably missing data and some of it reflects that headlines like "USA donates 1 billion" don't actually always result in the US making a bank transfer for a billion dollars. For example sometimes it's a simplification of a complicated loan.
Your comment reflects a common misconception about audits. When the books don't add up that doesn't show that money is actually missing.
I don't love analogies to personal finance but a better one would be to suppose you asked a random US citizen what they spent money on last month and then compared it to their bank account. They'd probably be wrong, and you probably wouldn't have enough information to know exactly how wrong they were because they didn't save all their receipts and so on.
*edit: this report provides no evidence money is missing. to be fair it doesn't disprove missing money either
Great comment. On one hand I like what Oxfam has done, which is to show that the World Bank has poor financial controls and should do a much better job tracking where funds are actually spent. On the other hand I don't like how this is reported/interpreted (and Oxfam I think deserves some blame for how their investigation is characterized) as "there is a ton of fraud at the World Bank". That's simply not accurate, and your edit sums up the situation very well
This analogy explains well but it's missing the important bit: private citizens don't have any requirement to save receipts. Charities and businesses do have that requirement.
While I'm continually frustrated by the complexity and opaqueness of the US tax code, your analogy doesn't make any sense to me. If your personal finances "struggle with fraud", it means you committed fraud. So yeah, of course you should be held directly responsible. That's very different from a large organization doling out money for tons of various complex projects, and those 3rd parties (or 3rd parties down the chain) commit fraud.
Heck, if you give money to someone and they commit fraud and abscond with your money, you get to take a tax write-off for the stolen funds.
> you get to take a tax write-off for the stolen funds.
At least for US federal taxes, that changed with a very partisan ~2017 law, where Republicans stripped it down to only cover federally declared unique disaster situations.
Thanks, I was unaware of that change. Note that limit largely just applies to personal property: "For tax years 2018 through 2025, individual taxpayers with theft losses are allowed a deduction if the loss is due to theft related to a transaction entered into for profit.", https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc515#:~:text=For%20tax%20year....
E.g. for financial fraud crimes, you much more than likely would still be able to take the loss.
