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The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
- arbuge 13y agoLink appears broken - I just get an msn.com sign-up page.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoWorks fine for me. Try again, or open the link up in an incognito tab maybe.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoWorked for me too. Here, try it without the unnecessary part. http://money.msn.com/credit-rating/irs-tracks-your-digital-footprint http://money.msn.com/credit-rating/irs-tracks-your-digital-f...
- arbuge 13y agoThanks - same result though for some reason...
- cybernoodles 13y agoLink is fine for me.
- contacternst 13y agoEnable scripts?
- straight_talk 13y agoGo to hotmail.com, click sigh out, try this link again.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoArticle is from April 10. Was ignored then. Maybe people will have a second look now.
- 1morepassword 13y agoI love it. An IRS audit based on trawling public data is more likely to wake up the moronic "I've got nothing to hide" clowns than any total surveillance by the NSA or the massive cyberstalking by Facebook, Google e.a.
- joonix 13y agoThe IRS doesn't tell you why they've decided to audit you. They just say you were flagged. Then they audit you.
- maxerickson 13y agoIt probably won't bother the ones that diligently and conservatively determine their tax liability. I would guess there is quite some intersection between those groups.
- bthomas 13y agoThere's a large subset of that intersection that puts a bizarre halo effect around the NSA (everything they do is good) and the opposite for the IRS. So I do think this will wake them up.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- asveikau 13y ago> wake up the moronic "I've got nothing to hide" clowns I take objection to this. The NSA stuff is indeed questionable. Reading your gmail, that's very clearly a breach. But the IRS does have legitimate interest in knowing about when money changes hands. It's kind of their job. Let's take away some of the linkbait and media sensationalism about this article. IRS already gets a privileged amount of information on the "usual" way in which money changes hands. Bank transfers, stock sales, dividends, your paycheck, interest - they're getting that info already. So how might social media fit into this? I say if a modern day Al Capone figures out a way to launder money based on Farmville credits, yes, I want the IRS to know about it. If sites like Facebook are introducing things like payment platforms, I don't see why the IRS should not be notified that money is changing hands, the same way they are notified for other transactions. That's not the same as reading your messages. Which brings me to another point: > An IRS audit based on trawling public data A fluffy MSN article about what IRS might be doing is not the same as evidence that this is actually happening. If someone has evidence of innocent people being subjected to this in any substantial number, then please, let them come forward. Absent that kind of evidence I don't find it very believable.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- D9u 13y agoMeanwhile the fat cats pay little, or no taxes... GE paid 7% in 2010, partly due to the poor economy. How many of us wish we could get away with only paying 7% tax? http://money.msn.com/taxes/latest.aspx?post=26d490bd-7317-4f93-8b43-e1da1151ea5f http://money.msn.com/taxes/latest.aspx?post=26d490bd-7317-4f...
- skibob1027 13y agoIf you want to tax corporate activity, the best (most consistent) way would be to eliminate corporate income taxes and tax capital gains as regular income. It would serve multiple causes: (1) Instead of spending inordinate resources in tax avoidance schemes, companies would have the freedom to focus on investing human and financial capital in serving customers by providing better, cheaper products and services. Remember, the cost of those tax avoidance schemes are embedded in the prices you pay for goods and services. (2) Taxes would only be due when gains are realized, thus allowing compounded growth to further spur the economy; (3) It would raise the effective tax rate of individuals who receive a large portion of their income from capital gains (something that seems to really bother those who worry about such things; (4) It's a more consistent approach to taxation. Today we are taxing the owners of a company's stock both within the corporation's income structure and then again when income and growth is distributed to shareholders as dividends and capital gains, respectively.
- maxerickson 13y agoDo you think it makes sense to compare personal and corporate taxes? Corporations are generally far better equipped to spend money avoiding taxes, so it probably makes more sense to try to keep loopholes to a minimum and evaluate whether the effective rates are appropriate for the parties they apply to. The article you link discusses the very wealthy having taxation dominated by the lower taxes on investment income. I think such taxes could be higher without having significant impact on investment (lots of rhetoric suggests that even tiny changes would cause investment to collapse, that's silly), but there is plenty of room to discuss whether government spending is a better use of the wealth than private investment (and such taxes do more or less have the effect of directly moving private investment dollars to government spending).
- seivan 13y agoSounds like Sweden. Some guy got a fine for saying something on his own Facebook page about his RV that was under the company. BOM. 400k to be paid.
- pathy 13y agoSwedish article on the matter: http://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/article16839634.ab http://www.aftonbladet.se/minekonomi/article16839634.ab I have no idea if Skatteverket (IRS equivalent) were right in their decision but the guy did lose in the first court instance. Also: If the Facebook page was public and Skatteverket were questioning the legitimacy of the 'business purchase', why shouldn't they check the page? Basing the decision on only one status update seems a bit strange though.
- seivan 13y agoThey weren't questioning or investigating, they outright fined based only on that status report. Guilty until proven innocent.
- pathy 13y agoThey probably wouldn't have looked the page unless they were auditing him. He found their decision unfair and appealed it but lost in court, so at least one instance considers Skatteverket's claims legitimate. Now I have less faith in the lower courts than I should but it does bring legitimacy to Skatteverket's decision.
- rplacd 13y ago"publicly" seems to be a prominent omission from the title.
- maxerickson 13y agoCredit card transactions are mentioned several times in the article. That isn't closely private information, but it isn't something I would call public activity.
- asveikau 13y agoBanks have sent info on large transactions to the IRS for some time. I don't see credit card transactions as all that different.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoHoly lucre ! 300 billion in lost revenue. That has to be wrong. Even at a tax rate of 30% (way higher than the US effective rate) that implies one trillion dollars each year gets hidden from the IRS. That will solve every budgetary crisis going.
- zeckalpha 13y agoNo, spending will increase to match.
- alan_cx 13y agoYeah, spent on sorting the country out.
- marknutter 13y agoWe've been "sorting the country out" for hundreds of years.
- deelowe 13y agoHAHA. That's cute. You weren't being serious were you?
- throwaway420 13y agoExcept you forgot to fast forward to the part where politicians, having even more funds at their disposal to try to gain more power, decide to use that extra money to increase spending even more. And contrary to the faux Mother Theresa like notion of government that some people like to project, that money will not mostly go towards relatively positive things like feeding hungry children, giving a helping hand to out of work people, or building libraries. This extra cash will mostly go to agencies like the NSA to spy on people more, subsidies to big farming companies, payoffs to the right corrupt dictators, to the FBI to throw more people in cages for consuming a plant, or to corrupt military contractors to build more useless bombs for the next war. The 16th Amendment (income tax) was only instituted in 1913 and the whole income tax is based on the disgraceful concept that you don't own the fruits of your labor but the government gets it before you do and only allows you whatever cut of it that they can decide on. The US was incredibly prosperous up until that time and was completely functional mostly running on limited tariffs. We would be even more prosperous today without the government sucking up such a large portion of creative wealth that exists in this country. The IRS should flat out be abolished not just for economic reasons, but also for political reasons. It is unacceptable that they are spying on people even more and that their power can be used to target political enemies.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoThis is an older article. One of the key takeaways is that Congress in 2008 gave the IRS the capability to dive into your personal affairs online in ways that even the justice department can't (without a warrant). They only need to view you as somebody of interest. Better still, the exact nature of all this -- wait for it -- is a secret. The long-term trend here is pretty clear. Congress has the Big Data hammer out, and it's not afraid to use it on whatever political cause of the week makes them upset. NSA was first, because terrorism was so bad. But dang it, tax cheats are pretty bad too! There's no slippery slope argument that needs to be made. We're already sliding down it. Just standby for the next travesty. Don't worry, the wait won't be long. Maybe a year or two. The American people remain amazingly ignorant and/or apathetic, though. One wonders how many wake-up calls it will take. ADD: The very interesting question here is this: since the IRS is authorized to go after emails and social chats without a warrant, how are the big service providers going to report this? Even if Google shows its thousands of NSLs, this type of activity wouldn't be covered by them. Some more info here: http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/mutual-funds/articles/2013/04/04/irs-high-tech-tools-track-your-digital-footprints http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/mutual-funds/...
- ctdonath 13y agoWake up? So long as none of it actually affects people on a day-to-day basis they won't care. Otherwise it's just another abstraction.
- euroclydon 13y agoTerrorism is bad. Tax cheating is a serous loss of revenue. Online privacy is a much more abstract concern for citizens than having their entire office building blown up or even a few tens of billions of annual tax revenue being lost. You know how people complain about the DMV? That's because they don't have to wait in line as long at their bank. It's the same thing with the IRS and Big Data, when a government agency doesn't use the latest technology, they can rightfully be accused of being antiquated. It just so happens that people are much more supportive of shorter DMV lines than they are of paying sales tax on Amazon purchases -- go figure. Furthermore, if government uses big data to catch polluters, that good. But if government uses big data to catch someone planning a bombing, that's bad?
- e3pi 13y agoPage looks like its from something called `Bing'. We see: At the top is a U.S. News & World Report button, 4/10/2013 4:15 PM ET By Richard Satran, U.S. News & World Report At the bottom of story we see `More from U.S. News & World Report:...' -None of this links back to original source. If I fb share it, or link it, this `Bing' becomes the link. without more further digging to get the original url, looks like I have to use this copycat of full-content `Bing' thing.
- jchung 13y agoPart of me wants to protect my purchasing decisions from public view. Another part of me wishes the IRS would use that data to just calculate my taxes for me so I don't have to do this ridiculous paper dance every winter.
- cowsandmilk 13y agoyeah, this is pretty much the flip side of the ProPubica report on TurboTax[1][2] [1] http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-fought-free-simple-tax-filing http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5443203
- MyNewAccount99 13y agocan they just do my taxes for me then?
- asveikau 13y agoIs it me or does this sound like a nutty conspiracy theory? NSA is one thing... But IRS? I have a hard time believing this is anything but grossly exaggerated.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoThe technical descriptions in this article basically make no sense at all. It's worthless.
- bubbleRefuge 13y agoTaxes are to high for the services provided. Laws are mostly written by lobbyists for large corporations. Now the IRS is going to use "big data" systems -using input data from Google, Facebook,etc - provided by profit driven vendors to enforce this treachery on the middle class and upper middle class b/c they pay the highest tax rates. Its kind of like red-light cameras. Companies who provide the red-light camera technology share revenue with the municipalities who they contract with. Perverse incentives. Makes me want to collect my family and leave the US. Become an expat in a low income tax state.
- arbuge 13y agoYou'll have to renounce your US citizenship to escape the long arm of the IRS. In practice this requires gaining an alternative one first if you're not a dual citizen. http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/29/americans-abroad-seek-tax-law-changes/fiduvux1S5a8i56WiAQCwM/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/04/29/americans-abr...
- tptacek 13y agoThis article makes reference to a 38-page manual uncovered by EFF, in the context of a story about broad claimed authority by the IRS to examine online data to defend tax challenges. What the article doesn't say is that the manual was praised by EFF: it instructs IRS employees only to use public information, never to misrepresent themselves or attempt to gain access to people's social networks by posing as "friends", and never to use confidential information as search terms. At one point, the manual explains to examiners how to use DomainTools to search for domain names, but cautions examiners that the site may ask for email addresses sometimes, at which point the examiner is no longer allowed to use the service and must instead revert to asking the taxpayer questions. It's this kind of writing that drives me crazy. IRS may be overreaching, or they may not be; who knows? We get all our information through a game of telephone by media organizations that incentivized to write the most lurid stories possible.
- pash 13y ago> It's this kind of writing that drives me crazy. IRS may be overreaching, or they may not be; who knows? Yes, that's the point. Breathless speculation is obnoxious, but that's all we're left with when our government hides its activities from us.
- tptacek 13y agoNobody needed to speculate about what the IRS manual said; it was right there for them to read.
- pash 13y agoYes, the article makes clear that the EFF acquired the manual via a FOIA request and that (like all such documents) the manual is now public. We know what's in the manual (guidelines for IRS employees on how to conduct themselves online). What we don't know—what the article speculates about—is what's in the IRS's databases, how those databases are populated, and the extent of the IRS's claimed powers in audits generally. As with the NSA's secret surveillance program, we're left guessing what's under the IRS's gaze and what oversight, if any, ensures that its scrutiny is circumscribed to what's appropriate in a free society.
- shiftb 13y agoDid I understand this correctly? "The IRS last year used a profiling test model to study 1,500 tax preparers with histories of reporting deficiencies and managed to recover $200 million. It cited the experience as proof that its data analysis works." They recovered $200M from 1,500 citizens? That's $133k each. Seems like an extraordinarily large amount.
- jnw2 13y agoIf those are 1,5000 professional tax preparers who each perpare taxes for many taxpayers, it might make sense. Going after only high income citizens might also create a reasonable situation where $133k/taxpayer in their biased sample set might happen. It's often not unreasonable to focus only on those individuals who might produce the largest numbers...