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..."

Comments

Re:The moral of the story:

[Gentlewhisper]

No.. the true moral of the story is.. American corporate greed knows no bounds...

Re:The moral of the story:

[oirtemed]

shorten it to greed and you got it right. Americans are no worse than other humans.

National sales tax now

[panxerox]

Its time to crush this 30 year old unholy alliance between the IRS and the 3 party tax prep companys. The tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.

Re:National sales tax now

[ScentCone]

tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.

Except, all they do is function to collect what the tax code says they should. Don't like it? You have to change the law. Fix it in congress, thus treating the problem, not the symptom.

Re:National sales tax now

[Quarters]

A national sales tax is the most regressive form of taxation imaginable. The tax system now is (mostly) fair. Everyone pays a % of their earnings.

The problem with a national sales tax is that middle to low income earners spend a larger percentage of their earnings. Upper class earners spend a much smaller percentage of their wages. A national sales tax would hurt low wage earners the most as they would be using the majority of their wages on food & basic necessities. The little $ they might have left after their purchases and their tax burden won't be enough for an adequate savings.

Re:National sales tax now

[NanoGator]

"Now she gets all the benefits of that military and police protection, the roads, the schools, etc, but doesn't have to pay for any of it!"

Uh... if they recieved an inheritance, and that money had already had its taxes paid on, then they already have paid for it. It's money changing hands, not money suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

Re:National sales tax now

[EzInKy]

Uh... if they recieved an inheritance, and that money had already had its taxes paid on, then they already have paid for it. It's money changing hands, not money suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

That money is not going towards paying for ongoing maintenance. Without inhertance and property taxes the burden falls solely on the backs of current wage earners.

trust us!

[chocochip]

"You've just got to trust us," Miller replied, adding that "if we didn't uphold our privacy commitment, we wouldn't be here."

Yeahhh, I'm gonna say no!

Trusting Intuit is insane.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Quicken used to be an excellent product around 1997 or so. But then they started adding in-program spam and call home features. And that's when I stopped upgrading.

Bad reasoning for not capturing SSNs......

[xiaomonkey]

From the article: But he said Omniture doesn't do this. The reason, he said, is that client companies don't authorize Omniture to do it.

So, is he saying that given the opportunity to capture this information, his company would? Semi-distrubing. What about not caputuring this information since it would be wrong to do so? Particulary with recent problems with identity theft.

-

Turbo Tax "web" version or

[the_skywise]

the boxed version? The article doesn't appear to say and I'm not quite sure why "web bugs" would be used to collect data on the boxed version. (y'know, like... when you could just capture the keystrokes?)

RTFA

[firephreek]

The /. article is totally misleading. Makes it sound like Intuit is actively tracking the actual returns and trying to compile info on the users, not just tracking and compiling the user process. Until there's something shown that the tracking is done beyond the site, I'm gonna reserve judgement.

If you're gonna get the tin hats out for this, then don't forget that Intuit also makes and sells the number one financial tool for not just businesses, but also personal finances. Quicken and Quickbooks. They don't need your tax return information. All your bank accounts are belong to Intuit. If they wanted to track your buying habits, the checking history of hundreds of thousands of individuals is at their fingertips.

The morality of the story:

[IPFreely]

If the IRS would actually come out with a method of E-Filing that does not require third party involvement, they would go a long way towards elimenating this type of problem. Look at the E-Filing instructions and it's all about how to find the right third party to do it for you (for a Fee!). Bleh.

At least some states have figured out how to file taxes electronicly and directly (and free!) without involving someone with a profit motive in the mix.

Re:The morality of the story:

[timeOday]

It would also be a large taxpayer expense.

Bull. It costs much more for the IRS to print and process a paper return than an online one, and if there were an official, taxpayer-supported IRS filing site, many more people would e-file.

I don't know what you're saying about everybody writing their own tax preparation software, but an official IRS site could certainly prevent fraud at least as well as paper forms or TurboTax etc.

This is a case of purposeful government waste in order to create a market for some companies. Like if I started printing my own paper tax forms, charging $10 for them, then lobbied Congress to stop the IRS from printing tax forms because it was "competing with private industry."

Re:The morality of the story:

[Saeger]

I'd much rather they withhold too much and I just get a refund in the spring so I don't have to worry about it.

Frankly, that's a retarded attitude, but a lot of lazy people share it. To have your employer automatically subtract (sorry, "withhold") taxes just so you can feel like you're winning the lottery when you get your "refund" is... retarded. Not only do you lose out on the interest, but the government has you by the balls because you don't even really feel the pain of PAYING taxes.

Since I'm self-employed, nobody withholds from me, so I get to feel it when I write my two checks to Fed and State treasuries.

By the way, Tax Freedom Day for 2005 falls on April 17th, so you're still working to payoff taxes until then... but at least you won't feel it. :)

Re:The morality of the story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I'm self-employed, nobody withholds from me, so I get to feel it when I write my two checks to Fed and State treasuries.

Don't you mean "eight checks"? How long have you been self-employed?? This statement surprises me (self-employed since 1997).

The US tax system is a "pay as you go" system. You have to pay your taxes close to when you earn the income. Otherwise you pay penalties. Unless your taxes are under $1000 or you just started out you will have to pay penalties (8%? something like that).

Does the phrase "estimated tax payments" ring any bells?

The only time I haven't paid quarterly tax payments is during the boom, when I could easily beat the penalty elsewhere.

So if you're self-employed, you *do* feel the sting of paying throughout the year (and yes you can overpay and get a refund, but that's retarded as you point out.. the government will loan YOU money at 8%, but when you loan THEM money throughout the year by overpaying, they give you nothing :-).

IRS position

[NoseBag]

Actually, the IRS position is a smart one. Basically they are saying "Until it gets to us (e-mail or snail mail or whatever) we have no knowledge of it, or its journey, or what happened to it between you and us."

That's fair, damn it.

The issue is with the go-betweens. I say - take 'em to court and smoke 'em.

Attention, obvious

[taylortbb]

I think any web surfer with basic internet knowledge knows that servers can tell what pages you visit, of course, they are afterall giving you the information. If most users find this surprising they should know what else goes on.

Can you trust the person sorting your mail not to open it? about as much as you can trust Intuit, however as soon as its online everyone gets freaked out.

As soon as you let someone else transmit your personal information this can happen. When you submit a form containing your SSN (social security number) the person on the recieving end or anyone in transit can read it, be the form HTML or paper.

Anyone sorting real world mail could open a letter and read it. Any company sending your data over the web could read the data you are sending them, well, of course, you're sending it to them for a reason.

Could a marketing company get people to infiltrate the post office and steal random letters to examine content? of course. Could a marketing company forcefully aquire data (via hacking, etc.) online? of course. But now its much harder, the data is encrypted.

Unfourtunatly most average consumers don't read /., but for anyone that reads this, *your computer is more secure, just because its in the real world doesn't mean it can't happen, and in the computer world there is cryptographically secure prevention*. People steals cars, break into houses, and commit fraud without computers all the time, don't be afraid of your computer, or stuff online.

(For those who are going to attack me because the article isn't about hacking, the only way for the marketing companies to get data is hacking, Intuit is *not* going to share that info. Either a or b is true: a) its against privacy laws, paper or internet. b) they could do it with your paper forms too, making it a moot point.)

Re:Sales tax NOT regressive

[daigu]

Progressive tax, by definition, is a tax the has different rates based on total income. Thus, a sales tax is not progressive. It's a regressive tax.

A regressive tax, in contrast, is a tax that takes a larger percentage of the income of low-income people than of high-income people.

Example: If I make $1,000,000 a year, and you make $75,000. If we both spend $75,000 on however we define sales, we both have to pay the same in taxes. You are being taxed on 100% of your income. I am being taxed on only .075% of mine.

While a regressive tax such as this one that is focused on consumption has benefits, it does not help address income inequities or have any built in system that recognizes the responsibility of people in fortunate circumstnaces have to the larger society and for people not as well off as they are - such as those that make below the poverty line.

Re:Sales tax NOT regressive

[Dachannien]

Mathematically regressive, perhaps, when you look at income earned versus expenditures.

But when you look at *utility gained* versus expenditures, a sales tax isn't regressive anymore. It's equitable, and some might even say it's progressive if you consider the necessities of life (shelter, food, etc.) to have a higher per dollar utility value than luxury goods.

Sure, that person earns $1M and spends $125k, and gets taxed $31.5k or 3.15% of their income. But what's that other $875k doing? Are they papering their house with it? Stuffing their pillows? Wiping their ass? No, they're socking it away in savings, mostly in investments, thus allowing other people to benefit from it for a time.

Money by itself, in the absence of something to buy with it, serves no purpose and has no value. Why should a person get taxed on the money they don't spend and don't get any real benefit from? That's already a concept implemented in traditional IRAs, where money saved in the IRA is not taxed, but when the money is withdrawn (presumably, when you are about to spend it) you pay taxes then.

Re:The moral of the story:

[jcr]

Surely you realize that when you try to ascribe any characteristic to a couple hundred million people, you're going way out on a limb?

I could just as well say that Europeans have nasty tendency to lump people together into groups.

-jcr