The Australian Taxation Office (“ATO”) has a bit of egg on its face: they recently were caught plagiarizing large chunks of text from my favorite on-line crowd-manipulated repository of ever-changing information, Wikipedia. The offending document, a “draft taxation determination”, borrowed heavily on the topic of how private equity firms treat asset sales. The ATO’s defense? Well, apparently the great Wiki (often confused with the Great Pumpkin) provides a “commonly understood” description of private equity arrangements. Call me crazy, but I don’t think I would consider any description of private equity arrangements “commonly understood.” I would hope that they would be “expertly understood” and that ATO experts explaining them could do it on their own without some nameless Wiki-contributor’s help. Check out the article at the Sidney Morning Herald here. Hat tip to Resource Shelf.