Forget the NSA spying on folks. The IRS is getting into the game of tracking you and your online activity in a big way:
The Internal Revenue Service is collecting a lot more than taxes this year — it’s also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it’s never gone before.
The IRS, under heavy pressure to help Washington out of its budget quagmire by chasing down an estimated $300 billion in revenue lost to evasions and errors each year, will start using “robo-audits” of tax forms and third-party data the IRS hopes will help close this so-called “tax gap.” But the agency reveals little about how it will employ its vast, new network scanning powers.
“Robo-audits.” Now there’s a happy thought. And, being the government, they also have far more tools and far more interesting ways of tracking your activity than any online marketer.
The agency declined to comment on how it will use its new technology. But agency officials have been outlining plans at industry conferences, working with IBM, EMC and other private-sector specialists. In presentations, officials have said they may use the big data for:
Charting and analyzing social media such as Facebook.
Targeting audits by matching tax filings to social media or electronic payments.
Tracking individual Internet addresses and emailing patterns.
Sorting data in 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique “attributes.”
Machine learning across “neural” networks.
Statistical and agent-based modeling.
Relationship analysis based on Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers.Officials have said much of the data will be used only for research.
Of course it will.
