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Yield Burning
Yield burning is a form of financial fraud involving the United States municipal bond market. Description Yield burning was a method by which major Wall Street U.S. municipal bond dealers cheated the United States government out of millions of dollars of revenue.UPDATE/MICHAEL R. LISSACK; Wall Street Expatriate
''New York Times'', April 14, 2002
The scam was initially exposed by whistleblower Michael Lissack in 1994, and eventually the firms involved settled with the government for $205 million.Whistleblower Says Dealers `Laundered' Bond Prices
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Municipal Bond
A municipal bond, commonly known as a muni, is a bond issued by state or local governments, or entities they create such as authorities and special districts. In the United States, interest income received by holders of municipal bonds is often, but not always, exempt from federal and state income taxation. Typically, only investors in the highest tax brackets benefit from buying tax-exempt municipal bonds instead of taxable bonds. Taxable equivalent yield calculations are required to make fair comparisons between the two categories. The U.S. municipal debt market is relatively small compared to the corporate market. Total municipal debt outstanding was $4 trillion as of the first quarter of 2021, compared to nearly $15 trillion in the corporate and foreign markets. Local authorities in many other countries in the world issue similar bonds, sometimes called local authority bonds or other names. History Municipal debt predates corporate debt by several centuries—the early Renai ...
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Wall Street
Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry, New York–based financial interests, or the Financial District itself. Anchored by Wall Street, New York has been described as the world's principal financial center. Wall Street was originally known in Dutch as "de Waalstraat" when it was part of New Amsterdam in the 17th century, though the origins of the name vary. An actual wall existed on the street from 1685 to 1699. During the 17th century, Wall Street was a slave trading marketplace and a securities trading site, and from the early eighteenth century (1703) the location of Federal Hall, New York's first city hall. In the early 19th century, both residences and businesses occupie ...
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United States Government
The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a federal district (the city of Washington in the District of Columbia, where most of the federal government is based), five major self-governing territories and several island possessions. The federal government, sometimes simply referred to as Washington, is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, executive, and judicial, whose powers are vested by the U.S. Constitution in the Congress, the president and the federal courts, respectively. The powers and duties of these branches are further defined by acts of Congress, including the creation of executive departments and courts inferior to the Supreme Court. Naming The full name of the republic is "United States of America". No other name appears in the Constitution, and t ...
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Whistleblower
A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whistleblowers can use a variety of internal or external channels to communicate information or allegations. Over 83% of whistleblowers report internally to a supervisor, human resources, compliance, or a neutral third party within the company, hoping that the company will address and correct the issues. A whistleblower can also bring allegations to light by communicating with external entities, such as the media, government, or law enforcement. Whistleblowing can occur in either the private sector or the public sector. Retaliation is a real risk for whistleblowers, who often pay a heavy price for blowing the whistle. The most common form of retaliation is abrupt termination of employment. However, several other actions may also be conside ...
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Michael Lissack
Michael Lissack (born 1958) is an American business executive, author, business consultant and former director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence. In 2019 Lissack was inducted into the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences. Lissack was managing director in the municipal bond department at Smith Barney, and came into prominence as the whistleblower, who exposed a yield burning scandal in the 1990s, whereby financial firms made illegal profits from the structuring of U.S. government investment portfolios associated with municipal bonds.Accuser in the Muni Bond Industry
New York Times, March 3rd, 1995


Biography

Lissack received his BA in American Civilization and Political Economy in 1979 from

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New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the p ...
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United States Court Of Appeals For The Second Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in case citations, 2d Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory comprises the states of Connecticut, New York and Vermont. The court has appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts: * District of Connecticut * Eastern District of New York * Northern District of New York * Southern District of New York * Western District of New York * District of Vermont The Second Circuit has its clerk's office and hears oral arguments at the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Foley Square in Lower Manhattan. Due to renovations at that building, from 2006 until early 2013, the court temporarily relocated to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse across Pearl Street from Foley Square; certain court offices temporarily relocated to the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway. Because the Second Circuit includes New York City, it has long b ...
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Qui Tam
In common law, a writ of ''qui tam'' is a writ through which private individuals who assist a prosecution can receive for themselves all or part of the damages or financial penalties recovered by the government as a result of the prosecution. Its name is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase ''qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur'', meaning " ewho sues in this matter for the king as well as for himself." The writ fell into disuse in England and Wales following the Common Informers Act 1951 but remains current in the United States under the False Claims Act, ''et seq.'', which allows a private individual, or "whistleblower" (or relator), with knowledge of past or present fraud committed against the federal government to bring suit on its behalf. There are also ''qui tam'' provisions in regarding arming vessels against friendly nations; regarding violating Indian protection laws; regarding the removal of undersea treasure from the Florida coast to fo ...
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False Claims Act
The False Claims Act (FCA), also called the "Lincoln Law", is an American federal law that imposes liability on persons and companies (typically federal contractors) who defraud governmental programs. It is the federal government's primary litigation tool in combating fraud against the government. The law includes a '' qui tam'' provision that allows people who are not affiliated with the government, called "relators" under the law, to file actions on behalf of the government. This is informally called " whistleblowing", especially when the relator is employed by the organization accused in the suit. Persons filing actions under the Act stand to receive a portion (15–30%, depending on certain factors) of any recovered damages. As of 2019, over 71% of all FCA actions were initiated by whistleblowers. Claims under the law have typically involved health care, military, or other government spending programs, and dominate the list of largest pharmaceutical settlements. Between 1 ...
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Internal Revenue Code
The Internal Revenue Code (IRC), formally the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, is the domestic portion of federal statutory tax law in the United States, published in various volumes of the United States Statutes at Large, and separately as Title 26 of the United States Code (USC). It is organized topically, into subtitles and sections, covering income tax in the United States, payroll taxes, estate taxes, gift taxes, and excise taxes; as well as procedure and administration. The Code's implementing federal agency is the Internal Revenue Service. Origins of tax codes in the United States Prior to 1874, U.S. statutes (whether in tax law or other subjects) were not codified. That is, the acts of Congress were not separately organized and published in separate volumes based on the subject matter (such as taxation, bankruptcy, etc.). Codifications of statutes, including tax statutes, undertaken in 1873 resulted in the Revised Statutes of the United States, approved June 22, 1874, ...
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Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio, ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', ''Bloomberg Markets'', Bloomberg.com, and Bloomberg's mobile platforms. Since 2015, John Micklethwait has served as editor-in-chief. History Bloomberg News was founded by Michael Bloomberg and Matthew Winkler in 1990 to deliver financial news reporting to Bloomberg Terminal subscribers. The agency was established in 1990 with a team of six people. Winkler was first editor-in-chief. In 2010, Bloomberg News included more than 2,300 editors and reporters in 72 countries and 146 news bureaus worldwide. Beginnings (1990–1995) Bloomberg Business News was created to expand the services offered through the terminals. According to Matthew Winkler, then a writer for ''The Wall Street Journal ...
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Bid Rigging
Bid rigging is a fraudulent scheme in procurement auctions resulting in non-competitive bids and can be performed by corrupt officials, by firms in an orchestrated act of collusion, or between officials and firms. This form of collusion is illegal in most countries. It is a form of price fixing and market allocation, often practiced where contracts are determined by a call for bids, for example in the case of government construction contracts. The typical objective of bid rigging is to enable the "winning" party to obtain contracts at uncompetitive prices (i.e., at higher prices if they are sellers, or lower prices if they are buyers). The other parties are compensated in various ways, for example, by cash payments, or by being designated to be the "winning" bidder on other contracts, or by an arrangement where some parts of the successful bidder's contract will be subcontracted to them. In this way, they "share the spoils" among themselves. Bid rigging almost always results in econ ...
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