The Taxman Snoopeth, Online and Worldwide

I doubt that anyone thinks that Amerika’s IRS is alone in its never-ending quest to poke its greedy fingers into every economic transaction it can find. Other countries’ tax thugs can be every bit as snoopy. Proof comes today via a Wired article titled Tax Takers Send in the Spiders. Some bits from the first few paragraphs of this fairly short piece [emphasis mine]:

Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.

The "Xenon" program ... was started in The Netherlands in 2004 by the Dutch equivalent of the IRS, Belastingdienst. It has since been expanded and enhanced by international group of tax authorities in Austria, Denmark, Britain and Canada, with the assistance of Amsterdam-based data mining firm Sentient Machine Research.

Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered -- something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages.

It's unclear how effective Xenon has been in generating investigative leads. Contacted by Wired News, the tax departments of Canada and the United Kingdom confirmed participation in the program, but declined further comment.

Dag Hardyson, the national project leader for e-commerce for Skatteverket, the Swedish tax authority, was more forthcoming. Skatteverket is scheduled to join the Xenon project this year, and Hardyson said web crawling is well suited to tax enforcement.

"The internet is wide open for tools," said Hardyson. "It's much easier to handle than the real world."

The last line of the piece, which is a quoted statement from a Swedish privacy advocate, sums up many of the issues fairly neatly:

"The information is public of course, because it's posted on the internet," [Par] Strom says. "It wasn't meant to be used this way ... (this is) using the naivete of people. It's on the limit of what is ethical."

The USSA’s taxthugs won’t reveal publicly whether they use spiders or not, but I think one would need to be quite the rube to think they don’t, or aren’t working hard to get to that level of ability. The “naughty men” will always find ways to slip about, though. It’s human nature—and not just within those of us who aren’t willing to be slaves.