Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Your Taxes
CTealL writes "Apparently Intuit thinks it's okay to share information about taxes with third paries. According to this article,
Intuit is using a third party tracking technology on all tax forms submitted to the IRS. "We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax. The IRS disavows any knowledge of this, saying "The IRS does not take a position on Web tracking tools." Makes you wonder where your tax information is going..."
"We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax.
But he said Omniture doesn't do this. The reason, he said, is that client companies don't authorize Omniture to do it.
Yes they *can*, but do they? *no*
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
That would be your DNS. Make sure you've got the right servers registered, in your network settings. There are some public DNS servers out there too, I think. Damn, I'm really replying to this when I don't know what I'm talking about. Of course, that's the danger in asking such an offopic question is such a public forum.
They were going to. Intuit and some others threw a lobbying shitfit about their multimillion dollar industry.
So nobody pays tax on necessities. From there, the more you buy, the more you pay. It's progressive without having to treat people differently under the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Banks make good money selling your financial information to "related buisnesses".
Sorry to burst your bubble. I work closely with dozens of banks and credit unions on this very topic. GLB inspires more neurotic fear in bankers than anything else I have seen in some time.
By the way, "related businness" means sharing information with other companies that must be there to support the bank, like disaster recovery companies, records archiving companies, etc.
Whether or not you believe it, "related businesses" simply cannot use your information for anything other than performing their service for the bank.
The closest a bank can get to profiting from your personal information is using it to offer services. A bank may notice that you have a high credit card balance and offer you a HELOC, it may notice that you have a high savings balance and offer its CDs, it may notice that your car loan is getting paid down and offer a pre-approved loan for a newer car, etc.
Other than that, your information is strictly off limits.
What it does is ask the server for an image (JPEG or GIF). But this request actually triggers a CGI program on the server side, passing it a unique session identifier that was served in the original page. The CGI app on Intuit's side most likely relays the request to the tracking company's server for logging. Cute, huh?
Since I'm not a customer, I didn't go past the login page. But it would be interesting to examine the analytics code served up in the account management pages - perhaps they pass not only the session identifier, but form values as well. (The analytics script could be triggered after the user hits the submit button, for instance). This may have been the point Omniture's CEO was making when he said that he could get customer's SSNs and salary data if he wanted to. Hopefully, there is a negotiation between Intuit and the web analytics firm about what customer information will be tracked, and procedures in place to verify that the analytics portion of the HTML does not collect more information than agreed upon.
Maybe someone with an account at Intuit should take a closer look at the page sources to see what parameters are being passed to the analytics server while you're managing your money.
Dissemination of your personal information without EXPLICIT voluntary consent is clearly against the law. I hope someone is smart enough and will sue the hell out of them.
Or, for that matter, you could file on paper, for cheaper.
Cheaper than free? I don't think so.
In an ideal world, you'll be sufficiently under-withheld that you don't have to worry about getting a refund anyway, removing the only rational reason to e-file.
I've got another rational reason to e-file. You save the cost of the stamp (actually to be safe you should probably use two stamps as one is probably not enough), as well as the hassle of printing out the form and mailing it in. In my case, I save the hassle of driving to the post office and buying stamps, since I generally don't have any stamps around anyway.
Of course, I wound up working less last year than expected, so I wound up with a refund, and I'll probably get one again in 2005 since changing my exemptions to 7 probably won't be enough (should have gone for 9, I guess). But yeah, the target is to owe $999 at the end, unless of course you can manage to get your income taxes down to $0, which is actually not too hard for 2005 (a married couple can earn $41,000 if they both contribute $4000 to an IRA and have $3000 of capital losses; if they have kids or one is a teacher or have student interest or have rental property or paid tuition costs they can earn even more; just having a few rental properties can theoretically raise that number to $66,000).
Filing on paper is still legal (as long as you prepare your own return, anyway).
For the federal return it's still legal. California (and possibly other states), has made it illegal for a paid preparer who files more than 50 (or something like that) California returns from not e-filing an eligible state return unless the customer specifically requests not to e-file, but the federal government has done no such thing - yet.
The IRS is now outsourcing tax debt collection to regular collection corporations. Last time they piloted this program, it lost the government money. Imagine how much more this will lose, when some of our most confidential info gets "lost" into the blackhatsphere.
--
make install -not war
Well, it doesn't look to me like owners of the Mac edition of Quicken 2005 are too pleased with the product either.
They may be once again "supporting the Mac" with their products, but it's half-baked.
I've been a Quicken user for keeping track of my checking and credit card accts. for years, and I recently migrated over to my Mac from Windows. (Mainly because I figure Windows has too many security risks like spyware apps that might potentially be able to upload my Quicken data someplace.)
I'm disappointed with Q2005 on the Mac though. The whole U.I. just feels "cumbersome" to me. I understand their reasoning behind trying to stick with the Mac concept of keeping everything in separate windows - but for this app, it seems to just get in my way. I'm constantly having one of my account registers disappearing behind my web browser when I have it open, trying to cross-check some data between my bank's web site and Quicken. I far prefer the way all the account registers feel like they're locked inside the main Quicken screen on a Windows platform.
Eh?
$0.37*4 = $1.48
$0.60*2 = $1.20
$1.48 - $1.20 = $0.28
>Read the site and learn!
What tax protestor advocates like the one you linked to never mention, is that tax protestors NEVER WIN. It's great to believe you've found some loophole that relieves you of the obligation to pay taxes, but to follow thorogh without destroying your financial status or being indicted is another story.
Good luck with that. Unqualified success stories are few and far between among tax protestors. Those that do succeed, usually do so by appearing in forma pauperis at their bankruptcy hearing. (I.e., you offer to settle your tax bill by giving the IRS 100% of your current assets, which amount to an army surplus backpack, six dollars forty two cents cash, and a few miscellaneous bits of twine, plastic, and paper, twelve pounds of aluminum cans, and a grocery cart.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
>I'm dead serious
Be careful. The information on that site is incomplete and clearly slanted to try to make the case from various angles that have been tried by tax protestors for years. They lose, because there are many more arguments, and more cogent and legally valid ones, than the "31" listed on your site.
> Show me where you think the law is
The law is in the Code of Federal Regulations, just like all other laws promulgated by Federal Agencies, with updates published in the Federal Register. This authority comes from Congress, which empowers them by delegating lawmaking authority to the agencies.
Don't stake your future or your assets on assumptions that come from this same, tired, *losing* tax protestor line.
Smokescreen and no substance? It has as much weight as anything else done under the authority of Congress. Don't like the tax status quo? Get organized on a national scale and elect representatives who believe as you do, and send them to DC. That, fortunately or unfortunately, is the solution.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
http://www.ecademix.com/JohannesHofmann/#flpsed/
The UK government has a truly excellent Web-based tax filing system http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/. It is one of the best examples of a robust, intuitive, helopful Web-based system I know.
It saves the government heaps in terms of manually checking paper-work and entering figures.
Female Prison Rape in NY
I guess you need to read the fine print on what those company's can do with your info
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
$999 is the most you can owe without having to pay penalties and interest for underpayment.
That is incorrect. The underpayment penalties are based on your prior year's return and a percent value - For example, you pay penalties if the tax you owe is greater than 10% of your total tax bill this year and if the tax you owe is greater than the tax you paid last year.
For example, if last year I paid $10,000 in taxes, and this year my withholdings were $8,000, but I actually still owed $10,000, then I would face a penalty as my tax owed would be $2,000 - greater than 10% of my total tax bill this year.
If I paid $12,000 last year and withheld $8,000 this year on a bill of $10,000, I would *not* owe penalties, as my *total* tax bill is less than the prior year's bill.
So basically, if the total tax owed is less than the tax you paid last year, there's no underpayment penalty. If the total tax owed is greater than you withheld this year *and* greater than the total you paid last year, then you better pray you've already paid 90% of the tax due, otherwise you get a penalty.
-EvilMagnus