American Lookout: Here’s another reminder that you have to be extremely careful about what you say on social media. The IRS is watching and may be illegally using data mined from Facebook and other outlets.
From the TaxProfBlog we get this report from two professors:
This Article examines the privacy issues resulting from the IRS’s big data analytics program as well as the potential violations of federal law. Although historically, the IRS chose tax returns to audit based on internal mathematical mistakes or mismatches with third party reports (such as W-2s), 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.
And the IRS organization has many employees who are tax scofflaws. Guess it’s do as I say not as I do.
It would be refreshing to see, after several months into the new administration, some indication that the corruption and criminality is being addressed. Guess I was expecting too much.
Sessions is the wrong guy for the job or this would have already been addressed.
One more reason to skip the social media profile nonsense, or at least keep the personal identifying details blurry and indistinct.
Enjoy that Fakebook account and Twatter 👍🤣
George Orwell was a prophet after all.
God knows the IRS stable needs some serious sweeping out but while the headlines state the IRS is breaking federal laws the story says they MAY be breaking federal laws. It strikes me that sweeping facebook (a practice done routinely by firms building user profiles to sell to other firms selling realtime directed advertising like Google) by the IRS may be very defendable in court as long as they aren’t misrepreenting themselves online. I would imagine there are a number of taxpayors who report a $30K income, have a listed address of a one bedroom apartment with no other assets and yet have a facebook page showing their newest hi-end Lexus, the multi-million dollar lakefont cottage and pics of their latest vacation In Paris. I have no problem with these types getting caught out by facebook entries. This process would need supervision by Congress and annual review as to what information is taken from Facebook (and how), how it’s matched to a taxpayor and what’s done with it should it prove to be not relevent.
The U.S. government does whatever it wants to do.
It also knows it must keep the majority of the population happy, and just above the “Revolutionary Line” to keep order and preserve itself.