The IRS Is Seeing Everything You Do Online
http://www.moneynews.com/FinanceNews/IRS-online-email-warrant/2013/05/17/id/505059
The IRS may be watching your online activities — including what you
post on social media sites, what you sell online, even what you write
in emails and text messages.
Some tax experts and civil liberties groups are disturbed by what they
call the agency's secretive practices. Taxpayers know little about how
it uses big data and "robo-audits."
"It's well-known in the tax community, but not many people outside of
it are aware of this big expansion of data and computer use," Edward
Zelinsky, a tax expert at Cardozo Law School and Yale Law School, told
U.S. News & World Report.
"I am sure people will be concerned about the use of personal
information on databases in government, and those concerns are
well-taken."
Anything you do or say on the Internet can be used against you in IRS
enforcement actions, he stressed.
The IRS spent about $1 billion in its recent data-mining
modernization.
As a result, the agency's is rolling out an effort to deploy
sophisticated data-matching and pattern-recognition technology, and
match up taxpayer returns with third-party information, according to
U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell
George.
The IRS is collecting massive amounts of data, tracking Internet
users' online movements, and using Social Security numbers, health
records, credit card transactions and other information that private
companies cannot obtain, according to U.S. News.
The IRS Criminal Tax Division has long believed that it can read your
emails without a warrant, said American Civil Liberties Union staff
attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, citing IRS documents. The ACLU examined
247 pages of IRS records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act
request to learn if the IRS obtains search warrants before reading
emails, texts, and other digital communications.
"So does the IRS always get a warrant?" Wessler wrote in an ACLU blog
post.
"Unfortunately, while the documents we have obtained do not answer
this question point blank, they suggest otherwise."
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Lets see America is really hurting and they spend a billion on this?