There was an interesting articles in this morning's newspaper, which was based on the following wired.com article: Tax Takers Send in the Spiders Revenue Canada and some European countries are testing out a spider which is looking for online tax cheaters. They are apparently targetting e-commerce sites along with auctions in the search of individuals and companies which are earning money on the internet but failing to report it as income. Countries involved in the project include Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, and the UK.
Well it makes sense. You can conduct a full sized company over the net using online financial services an never get picked up by the authorities.
That sucks....I live in the United States, but it won't be long before they begin following the same policies. I need to get some info on how to hide my online earnings. I hate busting my ass to make money just to turn around and pay a rotten government who uses the money for wars and other stupid stuff. I pay enough taxes already. I talked to a member here at DP who told me he knows how to hide his money from the IRS without them getting it, but he wouldn't tell me how he did it.
The article suggests the government spiders will identify themselves in different ways to make it hard for people to identify them and that they will spider sites in ways which do not attract attention to them or their IP addresses. This makes blocking them difficult. And, even if you blocked government IP ranges, they might use proxies and other methods to disguise the origin of the probe. I have no idea how they would work. I am sure they are looking at a variety of methods to try to figure out which e-commerce and other revenue generating sites, including those with ads, belong to their country's citizens. The most obvious sources of data are: 1 -- whois records 2 -- IP address ranges 3 -- phone numbers and addresses in websites Secondary sources could be generated from search engines or forums. For instance, bacanze seems to come from Lancashire in the UK, while I report that I come from B.C., Canada. Each of us have URLs in our signatures and profiles, which help the tax-spiders associate our DP IDs with our domains and any whois records which exist for those domains. The ways of building a picture of individuals are endless and so many of us have left so many breadcrumb trails across the internet over the years. Suddenly, sites dedicated to preserving the evolutionary history of the internet and various websites take on a whole new meaning. Scary.
Hmmm. That sucks. But why should the ordinary bloke pay taxes while the internet earners cheat the system? Taxes pay for more than wars. They pay for a lot of the infrastructure that makes us what we are today. Sure, lobby against taxes, but don't lobby for online tax evasion.