Monday, January 16, 2006

About Spending Tax Dollars Wisely...

IRS abuses offer insight into dangers of wiretap program | ajc.com:
"Under this program, computer programs and data-mining techniques are used to sift through millions of tax refund requests and financial records, using the same basic approaches employed by the National Security Agency to analyze billions of phone calls, e-mails and other data. But while the security agency is looking for clues to potential terrorists, the IRS is mining its data for fraudulent tax-refund requests.

It's a useful technology, but according to a new government study, almost two-thirds of the refund requests identified as fraudulent through IRS data-mining are actually honest and clean. Of those returns categorized by the IRS as 'conclusively fraudulent,' 46 percent weren't fraudulent at all. In other words, IRS data-mining falsely identifies hundreds of thousands of American taxpayers as tax frauds every year."

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