The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 27, 2007 @09:20AM from the crawling-towards-an-audit dept.

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected Internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated Web-crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites and to track operators of online shops, poker, and porn sites. Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, and Canada have joined The Netherlands in pursuing the 'Xenon' program with the assistance of an Amsterdam-based data mining company. Wired News reports that the Web crawler uses so-called 'slow search' to avoid creating excessive traffic on a site or drawing attention in the sites' server logs." The article notes that the US IRS will neither confirm nor deny using similar technology.

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Re:Interesting. by JKConsult · 2007-01-27 11:30 · Score: 0, Redundant

Your brother may work for the IRS, but you work for Wrong, Incorporated.

There are rules on whether or not the gaming entity (casino, track, etc.) has to take care of the reporting. But all gaming winnings are taxable. Period. You can net those with gambling losses, but they are taxable. I don't know where you get $2000 from.