Questões de Concurso

Atenção: Para responder às questões de números 61 a 65, considere o texto a seguir:
For taxpayer advocate, a familiar refrain
By Michelle Singletary, Published: January 15, 2013

    It’s not nice to tell people “I told you so.” But if anybody has the right to say that, it’s Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate.
    Olson recently submitted her annual report to Congress and top on her list of things that need to be fixed is the complexity of the tax
code, which she called the most serious problem facing taxpayers.
    Let’s just look at the most recent evidence of complexity run amok. The Internal Revenue Service had to delay the tax-filing season so it could update forms and its programming to accommodate recent changes made under the American Taxpayer Relief Act. The IRS won’t start processing individual income tax returns until Jan. 30. Yet one thing remains unchanged − the April 15 tax deadline.
    Because of the new tax laws, the IRS also had to release updated income-tax withholding tables for 2013. These replace the tables issued Dec. 31. Yes, let’s just keep making more work for the agency that is already overburdened. Not to mention the extra work for employers, who have to use the revised information to correct the amount of Social Security tax withheld in 2013. And they have to make that correction in order to withhold a larger Social Security tax of 6.2 percent on wages, following the expiration of the payroll tax cut in effect for 2011 and 2012.
    Oh, and there was the near miss with the alternative minimum tax that could have delayed the tax filing season to late March. The AMT was created to target high-income taxpayers who were claiming so many deductions that they owed little or no income tax. Olson and many others have complained for years that the AMT wasn’t indexed for inflation.
    “Many middle- and upper-middle-class taxpayers pay the AMT, while most wealthy taxpayers do not, and thousands of millionaires pay
...A.... income tax at all,” Olson said.
    As part of the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, the AMT is now fixed, a move that the IRS was anticipating. It had already decided to program its systems on the assumption that an AMT patch would be passed, Olson said. Had the agency not taken the risk, the time it would have taken to update the systems “would have brought about the most chaotic filing season in memory,” she said in her report.
    The tax code contains almost 4 million words. Since 2001, there have been about 4,680 changes, or an average of more than one change a day. What else troubles Olson? Here’s what:
    − Nearly 60 percent of taxpayers hire paid preparers, and another 30 percent rely on commercial software to prepare their returns.
    − Many taxpayers don’t really know how their taxes are computed and what rate of tax they pay.
    − The complex code makes tax fraud ...B... to detect.
    − Because the code is so complicated, it creates an impression that many taxpayers are not paying their fair share. This reduces trust in the system and perhaps leads some people to cheat. Who wants to be the sucker in this game? So someone might not declare all of his income, rationalizing that millionaires get to use the convoluted code to greatly reduce their tax liability.
    − In fiscal year 2012, the IRS received around 125 million calls. But the agency answered only about two out of three calls from people trying to reach a live person, and those taxpayers had to wait, on average, about 17 minutes to get through.
    “I hope 2013 brings about fundamental tax simplification,” Olson pleaded in her report. She urged Congress to reassess the need for the tax breaks we know as income exclusions, exemptions, deductions and credits. It’s all these tax advantage breaks that complicate the code. If done right, and without reducing revenue, tax rates could be substantially lowered in exchange for ending tax breaks, she said.

(Adapted from http://js.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/for-taxpayer-advocate-a-familiar-refrain/2013/01/15/a10327ce-5f59-11e2-b05a-605528f6b712_story.html)

How to determine your income tax bracket
by Elizabeth Rosen, Contributor
January 31, 2013

In order to properly file your federal income tax return and pay any tax that you owe, it is necessary to understand your income tax bracket, your filing status, and which income tax rate(s) apply to you. There are currently six marginal income tax brackets and five federal filing statuses. The amount of tax you owe will depend on your filing status and how much taxable income you earn.
Marginal Income Tax Brackets
Your marginal income tax bracket basically represents the highest tax rate that you MODAL pay on your income. There are currently six marginal income tax brackets for each federal filing status: 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, and 35 percent.
The marginal tax bracket system is a gradual tax schedule, which essentially means the more you earn, the more tax you pay. The amount of taxable income that you earn determines which tax bracket(s) you fall into. It is important to realize that only the money you earn within a certain tax bracket is taxed at that rate. In other words, if you earned more in 2012 than you did in 2011 and thus moved into a higher tax bracket, only the money that falls within that higher tax bracket is taxed at the higher rate.
So, for example, if you move from the 25 percent tax bracket to the 28 percent tax bracket, you may make the mistake of believing that all of your income is now taxed at that higher rate. However, only the money that you earn within the 28 percent bracket is taxed at that rate.
The structure of federal income tax brackets was first implemented by the IRS in the early 1900s in an attempt to create a progressive tax system that would demand less from lower-income individuals. This system, plus a series of tax credits and tax deductions, have allowed nearly half of Americans to avoid owing federal income tax altogether [Source: The Tax Foundation].
Federal Filing Statuses
Your filing status determines your filing requirements (whether or not you are required to file a tax return and which return to file), your standard deduction amount, your eligibility for certain tax credits and tax deductions, and your income tax. There are five federal filing statuses based on marital status and other conditions: single, married filing separately, married filing jointly, head of household, and qualifying widow(er) with dependent child.
When you fill out your federal income tax return, you must specify what your filing status is on the tax form. Review each filing status carefully and choose the one that best fits your situation. If you qualify for more than one filing status, you are allowed to choose the one
that offers you the ADJECTIVE tax.

(Adapted from http://www.irs.com/articles/how-determine-your-income-tax-bracket)

Based on the text above, judge the following items.

January 23, 2009
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide
By JOHN MARKOFF

    A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world’s leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
    In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downandup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys.
    Experts say it is the K1K1 infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world.
    Worms like Conficker not only ricochet around the Internet at lightning speed, they harness infected computers into unified systems called botnets, which can then accept programming instructions from their clandestine masters.
    Many computer users may not notice that their machines have been infected, and computer security researchers said they were waiting for the instructions to materialize, to determine what impact the botnet will have on PC users. It might operate in the background, using the infected computer to send spam or infect other computers, or it might steal the PC user’s personal information.
    Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks.
    Earlier this week, security researchers at Qualys, a Silicon Valley security firm, estimated that about 30 percent of Windows-based computers attached to the Internet remain vulnerable to infection because they have not been updated with the patch, despite the fact that it was made available in October.
    Unraveling the program has been particularly challenging because it comes with encryption mechanisms that hide its internal workings from those seeking to disable it.
    The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally, greatly complicating the task of law enforcement and security companies trying to intervene and block the activation of the botnet.
    Several computer security firms said that although Conficker appeared to have been written from scratch, it had parallels to the work of a suspected Eastern European criminal gang that has profited by sending programs known as “scareware” to personal computers that seem to warn users of an infection and ask for credit card numbers to pay for bogus antivirus software that actually further infects their computer.
    One intriguing clue left by the malware authors is that the first version of the program checked to see if the computer had a Ukrainian keyboard layout. If it found it had such a keyboard, it would not infect the machine, according to Phillip Porras, a security investigator at SRI International who has disassembled the program to determine how it functioned.

(Adapted from The New York Times)