New York should tap Seattle tax-cheat trap

TWO years ago, The Post tried very hard to get New York to crack down on a specific type of sales-tax fraud. But all the state did was slap a few wrists and allow the scam to continue.

Now, Seattle, with the help of the federal government, is coming down hard on so-called “zappers” — high tech cash registers that allow businesses to hide sales and, therefore, avoid paying local and federal tax.

Maybe New York will wake up once it hears the story about Seattle’s zapper litigation and the Chinese company that is helping restaurants on the West Coast cheat.

Zappers are also known as “revenue suppression software,” or RSS. Cash registers, too, have a more formal name: point of sales (POS) computer systems. When retailers install RSS software in a POS, they can hide sales and pay less of your cash to the government in taxes.

It’s not that the customer gets the benefit. The business just pads its profits by pocketing what it would have paid in sales tax.

I explained all of this in a series of exclusive columns back in 2014. Eventually, New York fined a few dozen restaurants but allowed the cheaters to remain anonymous and the scams to continue.

How zappers work is simple. The software will allow, for instance, every third drink or tenth meal to disappear from the records. And the software will also adjust a restaurant’s inventory so the discrepancy isn’t picked up in an audit.

There’s no way of knowing just how much revenue New York could be losing because nobody knows what percentage of restaurants or businesses are using zappers. But my investigation showed that the practice was widespread with a lot of POS terminal sellers offering the service and promising to crash a store’s POS hard drive in case of an audit.

Seattle wasn’t having any of this nonsense. It made possession of zapper software illegal. And the city and the feds late last month charged a salesman named John

Yin with wire fraud in a scheme to defraud. Yin was selling software for a company called Profitek, which is based in Canada but was dealing with Yin through a Chinese subsidiary.

Yin quickly pleaded guilty, and it looks as though he will testify against not only Profitek but also his customers up and down the West Coast. All these customers needed to do to get the cheating software was pay Yin $650 and then just download the software. So, this scam is probably pretty widespread.

New York still doesn’t seem interested in pursuing the crooks. But think of what it could do with the many dollars in revenue it has already lost and will continue to lose. Maybe take care of all the needy families in Manhattan — or give some relief to honest taxpayers.

Months and months ago, I told you that the Russians had hacked the Democrats’ and Hillary Clin

ton’s computers. I said it was probably done through a surrogate in Bulgaria.

I had gotten that and other information from a very reliable intelligence source I have known for two decades. That information — plus a whole lot of other stuff I knew about Clinton and about the weak economy — led me to write that the Democrats were making a terrible mistake by nominating her and that she would lose the election.

“Too many people know too many bad things about her” was the shorthand I used to explain all of this.

She did lose. And now everyone, including the FBI and CIA, agrees that the Russians did hack e-mails.

Since I was right about that much, let me remind you of some other things my source told me months ago that make this storyy even more interesting andd complex.

First, I wrote that the US National Security Agency (NSA) knew what the Russians were doing and warned the Democrats. How’d the NSA know? My source told me that the NSA was hacking the Russians while the Russians were hacking the Democrats. (Apparently this isn’t unusual in the spy game.)

And the NSA had offered the hacked e-mails to FBI Director

James Comey but was turned down for reasons only Comey can explain.

Another thing: Clinton, my source told me back then, had asked for special permission from the White House to have a non-secure room built at the State Department so she could use her beloved BlackBerry.

Usually, meetings are held inside what’s called a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF. “When a meeting is held inside a SCIF, spies can’t snoop. And BlackBerrys don’t work inside a SCIF,” I wrote in an Aug. 10 column.

The NSA objected, but the White House reluctantly gave its approval to Clinton’s demand. So that gets P

President Obama, who personally would have had to oblige Clinton, directly involved in this mess.

Since Clinton’s password had been stolen by the Russians during a trip to that country, her information was easy pickings, I was told.

Obama said last week that he told Russian President Vladimir

Putin to “cut it out” — stop messing with the US election by releasing hacked e-mails.

Anyway, let me just toss all that additional information into the pot that’s already boiling over.