[Air-L] Fwd: The IRS wants to use social media to catch tax cheats

[Joly MacFie]

[Note:  This item comes from Randall Head.  via Dewayne Hendricks]

---------- Forwarded message ---------

The IRS wants to use social media to catch tax cheats
By Justin Rohrlich
Dec 26 2018
<
https://qz.com/1507962/the-irs-wants-to-use-facebook-and-instagram-to-catch-tax-evaders/
>

The Internal Revenue Service is looking for ways to scour social media
platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in its ongoing quest to
catch tax cheats.

That’s according to a request for information issued December 18 by the
IRS’s National Office of Procurement. The mining of social media data by
the agency has been suspected in the past, but the IRS has never before
confirmed the practice.

“Businesses and individuals increasingly use social media to advertise,
promote, and sell products and services,” the IRS solicitation reads. “For
example, taxpayers can create ‘online stores’ on social networking sites
free of cost. Much of this information is unrestricted, allowing the
public, businesses and various governmental agencies to discover taxpayers’
locations and income sources. But the IRS currently has no formal tool to
access this public information, compile social media feeds, or search
multiple social media sites.”

Current IRS policy regarding its employees’ use of internet-based social
media research is “largely prohibitive,” it continues. Workers are barred
from using their personal social media accounts for work, nor are they
allowed to create fake accounts to perform compliance-related tasks. The
IRS also “prohibits fictitious ‘friending,’ ‘liking,’ and ‘following’ a
person or business.”

Evinnia Lenick, a senior program analyst with the IRS who is overseeing
this stage of the initiative, and Kelvin Bogan, the contract specialist on
the project, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

American businesses underpay their taxes by $125 billion each year,
according to IRS estimates. Overall, the tax agency reports a net tax gap
of more than $400 billion annually due to tax evaders.

The agency can certainly use all the help it can get, especially in the
face of a budget deficit that has swollen under president Donald Trump to
$782 billion; corporate tax receipts have dropped $92 billion
year-over-year. The IRS is also working with fewer resources: As of last
year, it had 9,510 auditors, one-third fewer than it had in 2010. It
conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop of 42%.
What’s more, nearly a third of current IRS employees will be eligible to
retire in the next year.

As such, the IRS is looking for a social media search tool that will, among
other things:

        • Provide a product that is easily explainable in court.
        • Provide real time, customizable reports of publicly available
social media information (provided or advertised by businesses), such as
new products, current sales, and new locations.
        • Provide reports showing that a taxpayer participated in an online
chat room, blog, or forum, and reports showing the chat room or blog
conversation threads.
        • Provide available biometric data, such as photos, current
address, or changes to marital status.
        • Provide access for at least 25,000 concurrent users.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp




-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
--------------------------------------------------------------
-