The IRS Wants to Look at Your Bank Account

The IRS Wants to Look at Your Bank Account(wsj.com)

13 points by jonkratz 4 years ago | 17 comments

akerl_ 4 years ago |

I’m gonna report my interest income at tax time anyways. Is there a way I can opt in to the government just collecting all my finance records and then filing my taxes on my behalf?

cmaxmagee 4 years ago | |

Government is prohibited from doing this. Intuit and anti-tax groups have made it so.

josephd79 4 years ago | | |

No. The government including the IRS allowed them to prohibit this. They also allowed them to scam the United States citizens into paying to have your taxes done when they were supposed to provide a free means for most people to do them. Intuit and the others like them should be banned from providing tax services to anyone for life.

RileyJames 4 years ago | |

This is pretty much how tax works in New Zealand.

I received a tax return this year, which surprised me because I hadn’t filled anything out.

Turns out they just use the details provided by your employer, tax paid and send you your return.

I assume you can request a revaluation to submit additional expenses, etc.

Note: this is for standard employment. I’ve been contracting since then and have an app/service handling taxes for me now.

naveen99 4 years ago | |

Are you going to report all your promises and I owe you’s to the government also ? What about any favors you have done people. Are you going to report them as assets ? Are you going to report the number of friends you have ? Your height ; weight , symmetry of your face ? You strength ? Your iq ? Your number of admirers and followers ?

nightowl_games 4 years ago |

I think the American elite, and the Republican party are trying to frame this issue as if it is about regular Americans. Even the title of this link does that. I imagine the IRS would use this to pursue the wealthy who regularly use tax loop holes. I've heard that the IRS is massively defunded and toothless. We all know the American elite pay very little taxes and we all know the WSJ carries water for the American elite.

Disclaimer: I'm not American.

marcinjachymiak 4 years ago | |

The trigger for surveillance is $600 which is practically every American. It is certainly about regular people.

Larger sums of many are already tracked, so wealthy people would have already been monitored.

ultrarunner 4 years ago | | |

The current limit is $10,000 (but practically less in an attempt to nail those who engage in "structuring" transactions to avoid the $10k limit). That's a car or any other number of things in reach of normal not-considered-wealthy people. [0] is interesting reading, but honestly just searching for "structuring" leads to several cases like [1] where the government seized $107,000 from a convenience store owner due to the deposits from that business being under the reporting threshold.

I don't know how you get under a $600 threshold, but exposing orders of magnitude more people to this policy is likely to do far more damage than to result in any good. This is already not just about wealthy people.

[0] https://www.overlawyered.com/2012/04/structuring-who-can-get...

[1] https://reason.com/2015/05/01/irs-steals-107000-from-conveni...

salawat 4 years ago | |

This is much more aimed at the "little guy". There's apparently any number of things you can end up doing for someone that'd qualify as a taxable event. Getting financial institutions to report movements over $600 is getting into "Eh, gave my buddy 600 for <one-off thing>, now he owes me a favor or whatever". Which is way more intrusive than it's ever been in my lifetime.

jjeaff 4 years ago | |

Actually, due to lack of funding, the IRS has found that it is easier to go after middle and upper middle income earners rather than the wealthy. The wealthy have attorneys and the means to fight audits and make things difficult. You can just strong arm a middle class citizen and they will just pay up out of fear.

cheschire 4 years ago | |

One could imagine this could even be used by the elite to ensure nobody else can become elite. Anonymous tips, some comments made during an audit, and the multimillionaires suddenly struggle to make that third comma.

haspoken 4 years ago |

https://archive.is/Te6Lv