UPSC Rectt. Test, Rejection list 418 Posts of Enforcement Officer – Accounts Officer in EPFO
TheCommissionhasdecidedtoconductanOfflinePenandPaperBasedRECRUITMENT TESTfor short-listing the candidates for the above mentioned posts on02.07.2023 (SUNDAY) (FORENOON SESSION) from 9.30 A.M to 11.30 A.M at79 Centres as already indicated in the above mentioned advertisement no.51/2023.Only those candidates shortlisted in the RT and who fulfill all the eligibilityconditions of the post shall be called for interview.
Dated: 29-4-23
The application/s rejected for non–payment of examinationFee/fictitious fee click link below:
Rectt. Test: 418 Posts of Enforcement Officer – Accounts Officer in EPFO
“It’s been a sea change in the regulatory environment over the past two and a half years since the Biden Administration took office,” Roger Altman, the senior chair of investment bank Evercore, and a former Deputy Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, said last month on CNBC. Antitrust officials have already stymied “a series of business combinations which would have gone ahead in a different environment.”
In the last two years, a string of high profile transactions have been abandoned after being challenged by the government. Those include Aon and Willis Towers Watson calling off their merger in 2021 after a DOJ lawsuit, as well as the abandonments of Lockheed Martin’s takeover of Aerojet Rocketdyne and Nvidia’s purchase of microchip designer Arm following FTC lawsuits.
And some companies are sometimes willing to sell at a lower price if they believe a higher offer will raise a deal’s profile and generate greater regulatory risk, according to one banker focused on the technology sector, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Low interest rates and a flood of fiscal stimulus pumped mergers and acquisition activity and deal sizes to record heights in 2021. But the bonanza faded as inflation set in, prompting the Federal Reserve to quickly raise rates in an attempt to squash surging prices. Cheap financing, a critical lubricant to deal pipelines for large corporations and private equity shops, dried up as Khan and Kanter began cracking down.
So, while economic conditions played a significant role in the slowdown in M&A, the approach taken by Biden’s appointees created additional hurdles for companies that would otherwise expand through acquisitions, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in an interview. Publicly traded companies are increasingly identifying the FTC, which also enforces consumer protection standards, as a public policy risk, according to the Chamber’s research.
There is “much greater uncertainty that [companies are] receiving from M&A attorneys about how long it will take — and the likelihood for — getting FTC sign off,” he said. Some chamber members have informed him that they’ve “walked away from deals because the uncertainty was too great.”
So far, the drop-off has had more of an effect on the whales than the minnows. A pause in so-called megadeals — which refers to transactions valued north of $10 billion — was the primary reason annual deal volume declined by more than a third last year, according to research compiled by Bain & Company.
“There’s still some purchases going on,” the senior Biden economic official said, adding that the FTC and DOJ are ensuring “that M&A activity is actually promoting what is fundamentally an economy that’s built on the idea of permitting competition and driving economic value.”
Nevertheless, the overall declines have been felt by major investment banks that count on underwriting and advisory fees. Goldman Sachs last week reported that its investment banking revenues had fallen by more than a quarter due to the global M&A slowdown. Morgan Stanley also reported declining profits as dealmaking slowed.
Kanter and Khan have embraced the mission set out by Biden in his 2021 competition policy executive order to hit pause on merger activity in a heavily consolidated economy.
Publicly, they have struggled in that effort, losing most of the legal challenges to deals, including lawsuits to block United Health Care’s $13 billion deal for health care technology firm Change, and Meta’s $440 million purchase of virtual reality developer Within Unlimited.
Kanter has said multiple times though that he measures success not just by whether his prosecutors win in court, but in the deals that either get abandoned during the investigative process are never signed at all. “The deterrent effect is powerful and the results are tangible. Simply put — most anticompetitive deals are no longer getting out of the boardroom,” Kanter said at an event last month.
The administration will be tested over the next year, as a number of high-profile merger challenges play out in court. Those include the FTC’s case to block Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard and the DOJ’s case to block the merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.
“Frankly, before the last two years, I never heard concerns about the idea that people were actually factoring in antitrust as they thought about doing some of these deals,” the official said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
A financial disclosure form that now-Rep. George Santos was supposed to file in 2021 might have offered key insight into the embattled congressman’s finances at a pivotal point in his campaign. The problem: he didn’t file it.
The missing financial disclosure is the subject of an ethics complaint two New York Democrats filed against Santos earlier this year and part of a bipartisan House panel’s investigation into him. Though it was obvious at the time Santos had missed the deadline in 2021, the issue did not attract much attention until after he had been elected to Congress and a series of resume fabrications and paper filing snafus began to surface.
Still, Santos was far from the only one to not submit the filing. Dozens of candidates who should have filed financial disclosures over the past two election cycles avoided doing so, or filed the forms late without asking for an extension, according to a POLITICO review of House ethics disclosures and Federal Election Commission filings. In many cases, candidates did not file the forms until after advancing from competitive primary elections, meaning voters did not have access to information about their finances before casting their ballots.
The vast majority of candidates who failed to file the financial disclosures on time have not otherwise been accused of wrongdoing. In many cases, they are first-time candidates who may be inexperienced with the federal system. But the fact that such violations are rarely even flagged and penalties are essentially non-existent makes it easy for candidates like Santos to avoid disclosing key financial information, ethics experts say.
“The failure to have some appropriate but robust enforcement of these rules is really inviting them to be ignored,” said Meredith McGehee, a longtime ethics expert and veteran of several Washington nonprofits.
Following the allegations against Santos, other House members have introduced bills aimed at preventing him from profiting off his campaign lies and requiring future candidates to provide accurate information about their work histories. But there has been little reckoning over the lax enforcement of existing laws that aim to give voters transparency.
Santos, who recently filed paperwork to run again for reelection in 2024, is facing investigations from local and federal prosecutors but has denied that he broke any laws and has not been charged with a crime. Asked about the financial disclosures, Santos’ congressional office said it couldn’t legally comment on campaign matters. His personal lawyer, Joe Murray, said it would be “inappropriate to comment on an open investigation.”
Missing deadlines and missing forms
Congressional candidates are required under federal law to file a personal financial disclosure once they raise or spend more than $5,000 for a House election. In odd-numbered years, the form is due by May 15, or within 30 days of the candidate raising that amount, whichever comes second, although there is also a 30-day grace period before a candidate would be subject to a fine. In election years, the filing is due by May 15 or 30 days before a primary. (Late filings are subject to a $200 fine, with further penalties possible but rare.)
The requirement that candidates file financial disclosures dates back to a 1978 law that aimed to identify conflicts of interest and prevent members from using congressional office for personal gain.
Santos, who began raising money for a potential 2022 campaign in the immediate aftermath of his 2020 loss to then-Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), should have filed a financial disclosure in May 2021. That form might have provided information as to how the eventual congressman went from saying he had no assets in 2020 to reporting being worth millions of dollars in 2022, assuming he filed it accurately.
But Santos did not file a 2021 financial disclosure, according to the U.S. House clerk’s office. His 2022 disclosure was also not filed until September, after New York’s primary election and several months after the deadline, although Santos had not drawn a GOP opponent.
“George Santos is an easy scapegoat for larger institutional problems that Congress has neglected to deal with for many, many years,” said Donald Sherman, senior vice president and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog that has raised concerns about Santos’ access to classified information. “The only question that remains is are they going to deal with him?”
The late 2022 disclosure and the lack of one in 2021 are now subject of an ethics complaint that Democratic Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, both of New York, filed against Santos in January. They are among a number of allegations under review by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which voted unanimously to investigate Santos last month.
Under federal law, candidates can face a civil penalty or criminal charges over personal financial disclosures if they “knowingly and willfully” fail to file on time or file a false report. Such enforcement generally has happened only in the context of larger corruption probes.
‘They’re not going to deal with losers’
There are a host of reasons candidates may file forms late. The chief one cited by candidates is that they were unaware of the requirement. Campaign fundraising, which triggers the requirement to file a personal financial disclosure, is reported to the FEC, which is distinct from the congressional office where financial forms must be filed. Navigating the barrage of forms needed to run for Congress can be difficult for first-time candidates who may not have experienced staff, ethics experts acknowledged.
Many of the candidates who have failed to file financial disclosures are political longshots who do not make it near election. Of the more than three dozen candidates POLITICO identified who missed financial disclosure deadlines in either 2021 or 2022, the majority either lost primaries or were in general elections that would be decided by more than 20 points.
“The Ethics Committee tends to take the position that they’re not going to deal with losers because their jurisdiction is over members of Congress,” McGehee said.
But a few first-time candidates have been elected to Congress despite missing financial disclosures, including Santos and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), whose failure to file was first reported by Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 in January. Ogles ultimately filed the form a few days after the local news report, more than eight months after the deadline. Ogles also faces questions about the money he raised through a 2014 GoFundMe. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ogles is not the only candidate to have filed the required forms after attracting scrutiny from their opponents or local media. For example, the Dallas Morning News reported last October that now-Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and her Republican opponent had both missed financial disclosure deadlines. Crockett, who would go on to win the election by more than 50 points in a heavily Democratic district, filed the forms in October after the newspaper inquired, and noted at the time that she had filed state financial disclosures that were more comprehensive than the congressional requirement. Texas’s early congressional primaries also complicate the deadlines for candidates in the state.
When candidates fail to file the disclosures, voters lose out on the ability to make the best informed decision, said Danielle Caputo, legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“It kind of defeats the purpose of being able to choose your representation if you don’t actually know who they truly are,” she said. “And financial disclosure reports are certainly part of the picture of who a person is.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday will interrogate former deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in Tihar Jail as part of its money laundering probe into alleged irregularities in the Delhi excise policy case.
The ED has taken the necessary permissions from the authorities concerned and a team will be in the jail at 11 a.m.
There are possibilities that the ED might arrest Sisodia after the questioning.
The ED will question him in connection with the alleged kickbacks of Rs 100 crore which the AAP party/leaders allegedly received through hawala channels from a South Group.
Sisodia was arrested by the CBI and later remanded to judicial custody by Rouse Avenue District Courts. His bail plea is also pending before the court which will hear it on March 10.
The ED has filed two charge sheets, a main and a supplementary charge sheet, in the case and has made 11 arrests so far.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks to guests at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting on November 19, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
NEW YORK — Florida governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis plans to travel to New York City for a law enforcement event Monday, according to a copy of an invitation obtained by POLITICO.
DeSantis, who is expected to declare his candidacy in the spring, is listed as a “special guest for a discussion on protecting Law and Order in New York,” according to the email. The event will take place early Monday morning, coinciding with the federal Presidents Day holiday.
Doors will open at 7:30 a.m. at the Privé catering hall on the South Shore of Staten Island — one of the few Republican bastions in the otherwise Democratic stronghold of New York City. Staten Island is the only one of the city’s five boroughs to support former President Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. It is a suburban enclave in a city of mass transit, congestion and skyscrapers, and is home to many police officers and firefighters who tend to back GOP candidates.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In Georgia, legislators want to create a prosecutorial oversight commission that could discipline or remove local prosecutors who demonstrate a “willful and persistent failure to perform his or her duties.”
A bill introduced in the South Carolina House would give the state attorney general the power to prosecute abortion cases — something currently under the purview of local district attorneys.
And in Indiana, proposed legislation would allow a legislatively appointed special prosecutor to enforce laws when a local prosecutor declines to do so.
The mounting tension between Republican lawmakers and local prosecutors over abortion is one part of a broader fight over diverging approaches to criminal justice — seen in recent battles over drug laws, property crimes and other offenses. As more prosecutors, particularly in progressive metropolises in red states, win elections by breaking with the decadeslong tough-on-crime mindset and running as a check on GOP lawmakers, conservative state officials say they now need to rein in their excesses.
“Whatever issue we’re talking about — whether it’s marijuana, abortion, enforcing homicide statutes, enforcing whatever the law is — the law is on the books, and the law is supposed to be applied equally across the board among our citizens,” said Republican Indiana Sen. Aaron Freeman, who is sponsoring the special prosecutor bill. “If we’re just going to basically ignore the Constitution and our republic and just do whatever the hell we want, well, that’s a society that scares the hell out of me.”
GOP officials are also exploring nonlegislative tactics. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat, over his public pledge not to bring charges under the state’s 15-week abortion ban. Warren sued in federal court to be reinstated, and while the judge agreed that DeSantis’ action violated the state’s constitution, he ruled that only a state court could reverse the governor’s decision.
The moves have left local prosecutors chafing at what they see as encroachment on their executive branch powers, tactics that Warren called “ridiculous” and “undemocratic.”
“It’s a political war being waged against people for speaking their minds,” he said.
Nonpartisan legal groups view this trend as a threat to prosecutors’ ability to use their best judgment on which cases are worth pursuing and how to allocate their offices’ finite resources to best serve the community that elected them.
“The individual exercise of discretion is the foundation of our legal system. This is a huge overreach by the legislatures,” warned David LaBahn, president and CEO of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. “When we’re looking at a series of cases — and this is not hypothetical, it’s very real, because we’re dealing with backlogs in so many places right now — should they investigate a phone call from someone saying they think someone had an abortion, versus a documented homicide or case of child abuse? If you have limited resources — should you pour everything into the first one? Of course not! That’s why you have discretion.”
LaBahn noted the wave of bills also threatens the “jury standard” — the metric local prosecutors use to decide which cases they could reasonably expect to win at trial with a jury selected from their local community.
“And the standard is not ‘a jury in the most conservative county in Texas,’” he stressed. “It’s a jury in the place that elected you.”
Some district attorneys caught in this fight argue there aren’t any crimes for them to prosecute even if they wanted to do so, citing preliminary data showing that almost no doctor-administered abortions have taken place in their states since the bans took effect.
Others, however, say they wouldn’t take up a case even if there were violations of their state’s anti-abortion laws. More than 80 district attorneys from 29 states signed a pledge a month after Roe was overturned to “refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions.”
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who runs Fair and Just Prosecution, the group that wrote the pledge, said prosecutors have the right to make that call.
“They want to focus on serious and violent crimes and not spend time investigating and prosecuting people who are making a health care decision,” she said. “They don’t want to turn miscarriages into crime scenes.”
Yet GOP lawmakers and their anti-abortion allies, many of whom believe terminating a pregnancy is murder, said prosecutors are violating their oaths of office — and the separation of powers — by saying they either won’t prosecute or will deprioritize prosecuting entire categories of crimes, instead of evaluating each case on its merits.
Under the bill introduced by Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton, prosecutors could face removal if they “categorically or systematically” refuse to bring charges for certain offenses, including abortion and some property- and election-related crimes. Attorneys could also be penalized for “categorically or systematically” not seeking the death penalty for capital offenses.
“It’s up to our district attorneys to enforce all of our laws, whether they like them or not,” Middleton said. “If they have a policy of not prosecuting crimes of violence, including our laws against abortion, then it subjects them to removal from office … This bill classifies abortion as a crime of violence, taking a life.”
GOP lawmakers have said that DAs who are unhappy with their state’s laws should run for the Legislature instead of using their office as a check on lawmakers.
“I think we all probably need to sit down and watch ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’” said Freeman, the Indiana senator.
Anti-abortion groups have coalesced behind the bills that go after prosecutors, arguing that state bans are meaningless unless they’re backed by the threat of enforcement.
“You have to have a penalty to serve as a deterrent,” said Rebecca Parma, senior legislative associate for Texas Right to Life. “We see how the abortion industry is pivoting since Dobbs and we need to respond as a state to make sure abortion stays fully prohibited. We’re seeing groups illegally shipping abortion pills into our state — trafficking pills across the border. And we have the phenomenon of abortion ships right off our coast. We need to hold people accountable for illegally aiding and abetting.”
Parma added that anti-abortion groups believe it’s not enough to target pr
osecutors, and that they’re working now with lawmakers in Texas to revive the system in place before the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, that allowed individuals to sue anyone they suspect of helping someone obtain an abortion, with a $10,000 reward if the suit succeeds.
“We can’t depend solely on the state and elected officials,” she said. “Removing a bad DA who will only be replaced by another bad DA is not going to solve the problem. We need another tool in our belts.”
The fights over prosecutorial discretion are not new — there were clashes in California a century ago over gambling — and not confined to abortion. In the past few years, bills have been introduced in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia to circumvent or penalize prosecutors who decline to bring charges on a range of offenses, from murder to marijuana possession.
And while most of the concerns about attacks on prosecutorial discretion have surfaced from the left, the issue can cut both ways. In Wisconsin, several local prosecutors are defending the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban against a lawsuit filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, arguing the state is infringing on their powers of prosecutorial discretion by pushing the courts to rule the law unenforceable. Several conservative state leaders have also, in recent years, said they would not enforce federal laws and regulations they disagree with — such as vaccine mandates.
Yet legal experts say the mounting calls on the right to force more abortion-related prosecutions is where “the rubber meets the road.”
“State legislators watch each other,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director of the Public Rights Project that supports progressive DAs. “And because there’s been so much noise around these bills in Texas, we expect to see these threats emerging in a lot of significant states.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
