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The IRS Decides Who To Audit By Data Mining Social Media (typepad.com)
In America the Internal Revenue Service used to pick who got audited based on math mistakes or discrepancies with W-2 forms -- but not any more. schwit1 shares an article from the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law describing their new technique:
The IRS is now engaging in data mining of public and commercial data pools (including social media) and creating highly detailed profiles of taxpayers upon which to run data analytics. This article argues that current IRS practices, mostly unknown to the general public, are violating fair information practices. This lack of transparency and accountability not only violates federal law regarding the government's data collection activities and use of predictive algorithms, but may also result in discrimination. While the potential efficiencies that big data analytics provides may appear to be a panacea for the IRS's budget woes, unchecked these activities are a significant threat to privacy [PDF]. Other concerns regarding the IRS's entrance into big data are raised including the potential for political targeting, data breaches, and the misuse of such information.
While tax evasion cost the U.S.$3 trillion between 2000 and 2009, one of the report's authors argues that people should be aware âoethat what they say and do onlineâ could be used against them.
While tax evasion cost the U.S.$3 trillion between 2000 and 2009, one of the report's authors argues that people should be aware âoethat what they say and do onlineâ could be used against them.
If you don't cheat on your taxes, you have nothing to worry about no matter how they decide whom to audit. Or you can take the Republican approach, and just start cutting the funding to the IRS until they don't have enough staff to audit anyone.
After all, if you declare on your tax return that your annual income is $30,000 and your Facebook page is full of pictures of you taking vacations in Hawaii, Fiji, Bermuda, etc., as well as photos taken from your first class seat in the airplane, then they have good reason to audit you. As long as they're searching public information only (eg. your PUBLIC Facebook profile and Twitter account) and not using special government powers to look at private information which would not be viewable by the general public, then I don't see a problem with this. You have no expectation of privacy when you post your vacation pictures to your public Facebook profile.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
1) Create accounts in my enemies' names
2) "Confess" to cheating on my taxes
3) ???
4) Profit!
No facebook, no snapchat, no tinder, no grinder. Fact is, I'm as close to 100% out of social media as can be. I don't understand people who are into social media, I don't hang out with them. They're like smokers were 10-20 years ago. You want to take a pic of me and post it to FB? Um, no, I'll just step out. I find out you put a pic of me on FB without my knowledge and best case, you ain't my friend. Worst case I sue you.
I posted: Yo, niggas! Look what I got from that refund I got from deducting $100,000 in phony medical bills!
->Picture of me with lots of gold bling and dressed head to toe in Nike in front the new Benz
Do ya think the IRS would catch that?
Aren't insurance fraud cases also sometimes brought down by "injured" people taking hang-gliding lessons?
After all, if you declare on your tax return that your annual income is $30,000 and your Facebook page is full of pictures of you taking vacations in Hawaii, Fiji, Bermuda, etc., as well as photos taken from your first class seat in the airplane, then they have good reason to audit you. As long as they're searching public information only (eg. your PUBLIC Facebook profile and Twitter account) and not using special government powers to look at private information which would not be viewable by the general public, then I don't see a problem with this. You have no expectation of privacy when you post your vacation pictures to your public Facebook profile.
I've often wondered whether this sort of data can be used as evidence.
Recently someone live-streamed themselves driving drunk (in Miami, IIRC) and posted it to youtube, and were subsequently arrested and charged. I can suppose that he was also caught on traffic cameras, but what if he wasn't?
There's no reason why this sort of information can't be faked - I could easily make up a FB account to presents myself as much richer than I actually am, I could fake a live-stream drunk driving video, and I can simply put "PhD" after my name for more status. People fake news events all the time, and some of it gets reported by the press.
Absent any corroborating evidence, could social media data be used to convict?
If someone fakes a drunk-driving video and is arrested, can the police then be sued for false arrest?
How much of a legal responsibility do we have for saying only the truth online?
[...] I find out you put a pic of me on FB without my knowledge and best case, you ain't my friend. Worst case I sue you.
I was under the impression that you need to have suffered damages to sue.
Is that no longer true?
There is also the Medical Information Bureau, the credit bureaus, ChoicePoint, retailers, and so many other databases out there. And this is been going on for many many years. Back in '91, I dated a lawyer and she made a comment one time - "With someone's social security number, you can find out anything about that person." And that was 26 years ago when storage and computers were expensive.
This shows how government without breaking the law on spying on Americans (yeah, I know - like they care) can build a dossier on folks that would be an East German Stasi agent's wet dream.
And it also shows this filing taxes is just one big stupid waste of time for folks who have W-2 jobs. They should just do what is done in some European countries. At the end of the year, you get a statement saying how much you paid.
This is no different than people who post on facebook themselves water skiing while taking big buck in worker's comp payments and have multi-million dollar lawsuits in the works.
I'm sorry. Anything you post is fair game. If you are a bad criminal, it is survival of the fittest. Dumb ones go to jail. Smart ones live comfortably in Costa Rica.
Thanks Obama! For putting another privacy stealing government program into the hands of Trump.
Looking at publicly available (and in most cases self published) information isn't a violation of privacy by any sane definition. It may legitimately constitute something we don't like and may want to proscribe our government from doing, but it's not a privacy issue. Words; they used to mean things.
Audits cost time and money and you have to prove every little thing you claimed on your tax returns.
Exactly so don't you want governments to use all publicly available data to ensure they only audit the people who need auditing rather than wasting both their time and other's auditing people who have filled in their returns honestly?
I would have objections if they were forcing websites to disclose private information on users but if people have posted this information on a publicly available website for all to see they should not complain when someone does see it and if that data reduces the number of audits of honest people we all benefit.
Finally a positive benefit to post as AC.
... is legally special stuff, with severe penalties for misuse. (Well, unless you support Republicans or something. Then it's fine to misuse yours, "hater"!)
Anyway, yes, social media stuff is public, but data mined, finely sifted repositories of it stored in government data centers are not. I think we can make the case that they are "IRS tax data" and thus deserve the strict protections.
No. Slashdot predates the term 'social media' by a decade. Like most early communities, it is topic based not personality based. /. may be full of namefags, but your name or fake internet personality is of no relevance to technology.
"argues that people should be aware that what they say and do online could be used against them." Now that's going to be news to many people. Especially if you think you are a right thinking individual.
The reality is that we have long since abandoned any real privacy and most of our freedom. We live under constant surveillance and there is very little you can do about it. People know this, but are in denial because resistance is futile.
So, if you want to sic the government on someone all you have to do is create a fake facebook account in their name, load it up with wealth-signaling photos, photoshop them into some of those photos and make sure the IRS sees it. By the time they sort it out, it will be too late because just undergoing an audit is an expensive and harrowing experience.
Yay!
What does it say when I can trust the Russian government MORE than the American one?
It was fine when all the IRS did wrong was screw conservative non-profits... no one got fired or punished.
Making the tax collector a political weapon was not a problem for Obama.
Why worry now ? Oh... you don't like it now that Trump is in.... I see.....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Some wisdom:
A dollar coming out of the government is not a dollar coming in. In other words, your taxes do not pay for services.
What happens is that, if the government overspends, as it has done every year I have been alive except for 2 or 3 in the late 90s, the money is created out of thin air to make up the deficit.
The only reason taxation exists is to preserve the fiction that my first point is not true, and thereby hold down inflation.
If people grasped the fundamental nature of fiat currency, they'd rebel against the idea and the system would go south almost immediately.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
No, you ignorant douche. People misrepresent themselves on social media all the time. They make themselves look happier, healthier, and richer all the time.
You are advocating increased audits based on data known not to be reliable. Not effectual. At all.
Ignoramus.
What planet are you reporting from where privacy is a thing? The word "privacy" needs to be removed from American dictionaries. It's a sad pathetic truth. Thanks a lot, america.
that good old saying with a wisdom beyond anything. People shoold learn those old truths.
right wing dissidents that failed to fall into line during Obama's presidency.
Big roads. Big houses. Big cars.
Lots of space. Say whatever you want and the government can't harass you or fine you for making a joke (see:Canada) or the government maybe jailing you for saying something politically incorrect (any EU country, particularly Britain, France, Germany and surrounding countries).
Plus the right to self defense (guns), especially of your home.
And now we know why...
First I like it because it's another reason not to give your data to so-called 'social' sites.
Second, it's ironic that now people snitch themselves to the IRS instead of their neighbor snitching to it.
Welcome to America. Everything is illegal. Everyone is a suspect. You are always being watched. Anything you do or don't do will be used against you in a kangaroo court. You have no rights. You lose. Fuck you very much and have a great day!
Can using public data be a violation? It's public.
Taxation is also useful to demoralize the masses, manufacture criminals, protect oligarch-controlled companies from competition, reduce socioeconomic mobility, and penalize disfavored groups.
Derpa
He's desperate to keep his finances hidden. I wonder why?
Then people shouldn't be stupid shits. It's no worse than an auditor seeing someone they know is poor driving a Porsche. At the very least, they're going to find out who owns that car.
And I don't really know anyone who goes out of their way to misrepresent themselves on social media. I guess your crowd are all shit-wads that have no lives. Except on FB.
Of and by itself I have no issue if they use public data. It however mean that they will go after the stupid people. The smarter ones would then not be audited.
That is unless they do random audits as well.
The danger is to go ONLY to these low hanging fruits as it is so easy to show results.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The state I live in has a pretty generous workers' compensation insurance system, as far as the US is concerned, and there are a fair number who take advantage of it. Investigators routinely go around and follow up on some claims. Every so often you'll see a news story where they caught someone was supposed to be permanently disabled doing roofing work off the books, or posting Facebook pictures kite-surfing in some tropical destination. It's just enough enforcement to make people think twice about filing a false claim....or if they do, to keep out of sight.
In my opinion this is no different. The IRS has a large amount of data on people, but they can't afford to go connecting the dots on every taxpayer. They can do a few random audits, and that's how most "normal" taxpayers get to experience it. But for the targeted ones, they have to pick easy cases and/or the ones with the biggest potential recovery. If someone is dumb enough to post publicly visible pictures on Facebook or Instagram in front of their new mansion and Benz with the hashtag #AllCashBaby, or flashing stacks of $100 bills, then they shouldn't be surprised if the IRS comes around to check.
Outside of W-2 wages and capital gains, almost every income event and deduction is voluntarily reported. Normal wage-earners are almost never going to get audited unless it's random. Owning a wildly popular deli or pizza place, OTOH, and claiming $40K in income is a different story... People's oversharing habits just give the investigators another set of clues. Moral of the story is to keep a low profile! (and pay your taxes...)
"The IRS is now engaging in data mining of public and commercial data pools (including social media) and creating highly detailed profiles of taxpayers upon which to run data analytics" (30 words)
Removing redundancy, complex structures, etc:
The IRS profiles taxpayers by mining data, including social media, then analyzes the profiles. (14 words).
The problem here becomes one of scale. A lot of powers that the government has are okay in very small doses, but not in large doses.
It is quite legal, and has been for hundreds of years, for the police to assign an officer (or a team, if they need 24-hour surviellance) to follow you everywhere in public. No warrant necessary, no court oversight, no constitutional limits at all really.
The limitation there is that it takes a full-time police officer (or a team) to do this, so it is self-limiting on the government. You only have so many cops you can assign for this.
So anywhere you go in public, the government can surviel and track you with no constitutional limits, right?
Okay, now, the government puts up cameras at every public intersection, with face recognition and car license plate recognition (ANPR for EU residents), and tracks you with just a little computer time, and the police get a summary of your movements with no real impact on police officers' time. Hey, you're out in public and have no expectation of privacy, right?
Okay, now the goverment uses that camera system to track EVERYONE. They also use this to build a database of everyone you interact with. Everyone is out in public, and has no expectation of privacy, right?
At some point, the excuse "It's public information" becomes an excuse for a police state. Reasonable people disagree on where that point is, and there should be periodic conversations about where society believes you cross the line from "okay" to "this is too much". Because, frankly, that line changes over time. It also changes with how much you trust the government not to abuse this power.
The last 20 years have seen a serious increase in the ability of the governemnt (and private companies) to collect amazingly detailed information about everyone with very little effort. It's worth thinking about where the line should be.
People have to be able to live their lives in public, it's a necessary piece of being part of society. (Facebook privacy settings are a related, but different, conversation. Ugh. Some people are too public.)
While you are not explicitly suggesting precious metals, it's worth a look at how they behave as currency.
Aside from the obvious inconveniences, they are also need to be standardized. This makes them subject, in practice, to chaotic manipulation. This transcription of a very libertarian historian's lecture recounts the tale of manipulation and inflation in ancient Roman currencies.
The lecture was intended as a cautionary tale about economic government management, but one important aspect of it is that, despite a currency based on precious metal coinage and an exchange economy based on that coinage and bulk precious metals, Rome still had essentially all the same problems people worry about with fiat currencies.
(For those unfamiliar with it, Mises is a libertarian think tank, and largely horseshit, but I rather like that lecture. Example of silliness: Road signs and lights that regulate driver behavior at intersections are an abominable menace to society")
You realize that the tax code is so convoluted and conflicting, that the IRS advisors won't even guarantee their own work. That often, one can use several different methods for handling a tax item. And technically, everyone cheats. I don't think there is a single American who has reported every single dime they've received, every single barter exchange they have done, etc.
It's worse than this.
I don't think it's settled law if it is considered spying if all your personal information is processed by a computer algorithm without ever being seen by a human being.
And in today's world, it is increasingly easier to spy on people by algorithm.
:-)
A lot of rappers, thugs, and other morons that like to "flash cash" on FB/twitter/youtube.
I made a mistake filing my taxes around 1992 - copied a number from my home-grown spreadsheet into the wrong box on the form.
The IRS noticed and sent me a letter saying "you owe us $1200".
I looked, figured out the mistake, and replied saying "my bad - updated form shows I don't owe anything".
The IRS replied "you owe $1200 plus penalties for late payment".
Two more cycles of this and I was starting to get nervous.
Finally got advice from a friend and owner of a small software business - reply and say the magic words "please transfer my case to Problem Resolution".
When you do that, the IRS drops your file on one person's desk, and it stays there until it's either settled or in court.
One call to the IRS person in Problem Resolution and everything was fixed.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Cops arrest people for all sorts of boasting on the fBook. Pics of rolling around in a bed with drugs and money, or flashing a stolen gun, or just bragging about the new flatscreen you stole and are willing to sell.
The IRS doing it makes a lot of sense. I wonder if Zuck is worried what this info will do to his stock price.
Of all the taxes, only the income tax has the feared audit. Occasionally a store gets busted for not collecting sales tax or collecting it but not paying it to the state or county or city or federal government, but that's not a fear that hangs over people's heads. Nobody talk about "weaponizing" the federal excise tax on tires to hurt political opponents. Why the fear?
Three reasons: complexity, amount, powers.
The federal income tax laws are complicated.
In fact, they are too complicated to be legislated laws. The Congress enacts laws which exempt some income from taxation under some circumstances, and provides credits under some circumstances, and requires some things be reported under some circumstances, but doesn't provide all the details. There's just too much. So the law (legislation) doesn't provide all the specifics, and the IRS fills in the details. It writes them into the regulations (regulatory law). Even then, they aren't always entirely clear and just (by the loose standards of the federal government). Cases may then go to court, and a ruling may come out overturning some part of legislation or regulation, or modifying it (case law).
So, all three branches of government are involved in creating the law (legislation, regulations, case law) which people have to obey. There's a lot of law to obey. Even IRS employees can't always give the same answer to the taxpayer's questions about what is required and what is not.
It's not just complex, it's also expensive.
If the most a person might pay was 3% of their income, an audit wouldn't be catastrophic. There's a rumor -- which I have so far have not been able to confirm or disprove -- that when the income tax was proposed a century ago, some wanted an upper limit of perhaps 10% on it. But that was argued down, because it was feared that if a limit was included, the tax might someday go up to that. Now there is no limit, not even 100%, other than the wisdom, restraint, and integrity of the federal legislators, bureaucrats, and courts. (Insert own joke here.)
It's not just complex and expensive, it's also rather arbitrary.
The IRS has a lot of relatively unchecked power. The IRS can freeze bank accounts, demand documents, impose or waive hefty fines and interest -- much or all of it without the involvement of the courts. And the burden of proof then falls on you. You can take them to court (judicial court) if you think you've been wronged, if you can afford it, and maybe you can win. And if you win, will the IRS employees who wronged you be punished?
Being upset about the IRS using social media to find targets for its audits is considering a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's like raging against how slave catchers use specific vague provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, rather than objecting to slavery itself.
The constitutional amendment that authorized alcohol prohibition was (mostly) repealed. It's time to do the same for the amendment that authorized the income tax.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.