can they just do my taxes for me then?
The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
61–70 of 101 posts
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The 16th Amendment (income tax) was only instituted in 1913 The 16th Amendment was instituted in 1913, but the first US federal income taxes were adopted during the Civil War, and the first peacetime federal income taxes were adopted in the 1894. The 16th Amendment wasn't passed to give Congress the power to collect taxes on income, it was passed mainly to expand Congress well-established existing power in that dom…
It wasn't well established. Income tax had been found to be unconstitutional. An "excise tax", which was the same thing, was implemented as a workaround. The income tax amendment eliminated the unconstitutionality decisively and was championed by the Prohibition movement.
Has anyone ever sued the government over income taxes being unconstitutional? How far did they get? Has there been a Supreme Court ruling on this?
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#63Is it me or does this sound like a nutty conspiracy theory?
NSA is one thing... But IRS? I have a hard time believing this is anything but grossly exaggerated.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#64This is an older article. One of the key takeaways is that Congress in 2008 gave the IRS the capability to dive into your personal affairs online in ways that even the justice department can't (without a warrant). They only need to view you as somebody of interest. Better still, the exact nature of all this -- wait for it -- is a secret. The long-term trend here is pretty clear. Congress has the Big Data hammer out,…
Just standby for the next travesty. What's the specific travesty here? The IRS already looks at and analyzes your private financial data both as reported by you and others and this is generally considered acceptable and a necessary part of them doing their job. So say now they noticed you reported $20k in gross annual income but are buying Ferraris on eBay. It seems pretty reasonable to assume, from that piece of pub…
If congress would simplify the tax code, it would be both harder to cheat and vastly easier for the honest to pay their taxes. And the IRS wouldn't need to snoop into everyone's life.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#65Part of me wants to protect my purchasing decisions from public view. Another part of me wishes the IRS would use that data to just calculate my taxes for me so I don't have to do this ridiculous paper dance every winter.
yeah, this is pretty much the flip side of the ProPubica report on TurboTax[1][2]
[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#66This is an older article. One of the key takeaways is that Congress in 2008 gave the IRS the capability to dive into your personal affairs online in ways that even the justice department can't (without a warrant). They only need to view you as somebody of interest. Better still, the exact nature of all this -- wait for it -- is a secret. The long-term trend here is pretty clear. Congress has the Big Data hammer out,…
Just standby for the next travesty. What's the specific travesty here? The IRS already looks at and analyzes your private financial data both as reported by you and others and this is generally considered acceptable and a necessary part of them doing their job. So say now they noticed you reported $20k in gross annual income but are buying Ferraris on eBay. It seems pretty reasonable to assume, from that piece of pub…
If you're implying they can go to eBay and figure out what you've been purchasing, that's quite scary. On the other hand, if they go through the accepted channels and gather that information from the credit card companies, that seems more acceptable.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#67The technical descriptions in this article basically make no sense at all. It's worthless.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#68"publicly" seems to be a prominent omission from the title.
Credit card transactions are mentioned several times in the article. That isn't closely private information, but it isn't something I would call public activity.
Banks have sent info on large transactions to the IRS for some time. I don't see credit card transactions as all that different.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#69Taxes are to high for the services provided. Laws are mostly written by lobbyists for large corporations. Now the IRS is going to use "big data" systems -using input data from Google, Facebook,etc - provided by profit driven vendors to enforce this treachery on the middle class and upper middle class b/c they pay the highest tax rates. Its kind of like red-light cameras. Companies who provide the red-light camera technology share revenue with the municipalities who they contract with. Perverse incentives.
Makes me want to collect my family and leave the US. Become an expat in a low income tax state.
Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online
#70This is an older article. One of the key takeaways is that Congress in 2008 gave the IRS the capability to dive into your personal affairs online in ways that even the justice department can't (without a warrant). They only need to view you as somebody of interest. Better still, the exact nature of all this -- wait for it -- is a secret. The long-term trend here is pretty clear. Congress has the Big Data hammer out,…
We willingly participated in building a massive anti-consumer corporate surveillance state, called it "analytics", and then are surprised when the government jumps onboard.