Here Comes the Taxman
Are your websites ready for the Taxman? A new robot, or robots are making the rounds, and its purpose is to crack down on tax cheats.
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. Source: Tax Takers Send in the Spiders
Not sure exactly what information they are collecting but apparently they have already been using it to catch eBay sellers not reporting income on their taxes.
The slow search prevents the crawler from creating excessive traffic on a website, or drawing attention in the sites’ server logs. Den Uyl declined to say what user-agent the Xenon software reports itself as, but it’s likely to be variable or configurable on the tax investigator’s part.
Who wants to bet they set it as Mozilla something? At least they are doing a slow crawl, looks like it might be time to invest in Botsense. This paragraph here is the scary part.
But Hardyson said the Swedish government — which already has its own internally developed tax crawlers — is currently keeping a copy of everything it spiders. That means that someone’s long-expired actions have the potential to come back and haunt them. “We can scan and store all actions for every e-marketplace in Sweden, it’s about 55,000 per day,” said Hardyson. He said his agency hasn’t decided if it will change its policies with the new, more sophisticated Xenon software. “Is this what we should do? Our lawyers must look at it.”
So they are holding all the data they collect on people and have no idea why that could be a bad idea. Anybody ever bought anything from a Swedish website?
In the United States, the IRS is not a part of the Xenon project, but would neither confirm nor deny that it uses spidering software in its investigations.
Who wants to bet that the IRS already has or are already developing their own? Along the same lines, maybe someone should develop a bot that spiders online dating sites to see if someone is cheating on their spouse or loved one, I bet there would be a huge demand for that…
