In the past, I didn’t think much about what the word “income” meant when I did my taxes.

After all, for most people, this is not a mysterious concept. It’s what you made. It says it right there on your W-2.

But the past year has been a mind-expanding journey. A tax acid trip. For the past year, I’ve been on the ProPublica team reporting on the Secret IRS Files.

Filing taxes this year was… different.

propublica.org/article/if-you…

When the Pandora Papers hit in October, there were plenty of big names among the offshore secrets: the King of Jordan, the PM of the Czech Republic, pop stars, mobsters…. but few Americans.

Why?

icij.org/investigations… The @washingtonpost said the best guess was U.S. billionaires didn’t need to go to such trouble. For them, avoiding taxes is easy.

washingtonpost.com/business/inter…

Sheryl Sandberg brought a lot to Facebook when she came from Google. But one big contribution that’s been overlooked was raising Facebook’s tax-dodging game: It was a big deal, saving the company potentially tens of billions of dollars that would otherwise just be thrown away on U.S. taxes. The details were a little tricky, but fortunately Facebook had a great team.

Why isn’t Facebook afraid of the IRS? Why do Facebook executives write things like “I doubt the IRS ever even audits us on this” in emails? That’s what my story today is about. You might think that, since Facebook crafted a plan to shift tens of billions in profits to a tiny subsidiary in Dublin, they’d be on high alert for the tax man.

A few years ago, I wrote that if you’re black, you’re more likely to see your electricity cut, be sued over a debt, or land in jail because of a parking ticket. Since then, without setting out to, I’ve been adding to that list. propublica.org/article/why-sm… I wrote that piece after a series of stories on debt collection lawsuits. The disparate burden on black neighborhoods jumped out of the data at us, so we did a story about it. propublica.org/article/debt-c…

Let’s talk about the brave new world of Trump consumer protection we’re entering, as articulated yesterday by Mick Mulvaney documentcloud.org/documents/4357… Yesterday, he emailed CFPB staff, and nothing stood out to me more than this: Enforcement should be really rare, he said. In his mind, filing a lawsuit against a bank or payday lender is “bringing the full weight of the federal government down on the necks of the people we serve”