Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering(diegobasch.com) |
Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering(diegobasch.com) |
Approximately 6.8 million people visit the Eiffel Tower each year.
It doesn't take a math major to realize that this is a laughable idea.
https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore#req=venues/49f...
Over 10k check-ins, and I doubt it has 2 million visitors per year.
Please elaborate on why you believe this is a laughable idea just from a numerical standpoint.
Come on, seriously.
E.g. you probably have a lot more Foursquare users in Silicon Valley than in Smalltown, USA.
Also, Foursquare probably has its popularity change over time. Right now it's still a little new and shiny, but its popularity might change over time.
If it was the only information available, it would be better than nothing. But your proposed method would be extremely noisy and unreliable.
I'm sure nothing bad at all would happen upon people reading that headline.
Are you serious? This is no way front page HN worthy. This is the worst thing I've read since that "wake up at 5am and eat a slice of ham to start my metabolism" trash.
Sure, you could do a subpar job with the normalization but then that will increase your false positives and decrease confidence in the method.
Plus this doesn't work for so many reasons, many of which people have outlined here.
I know there are legit exceptions, but isn't this the main reason they do it?
Not taking credit cards will cost you business in a retail location.
However if your plumber or tradesperson gives a lower price for cash, then that's probably tax evasion.
In the case of CC you'll get a payment 30 days later, so in VISA vs. cash, you're not getting the interest on the money, if you need to use the money you'll have to pay your bank interest, and you'll pay a processing fee on top of it.
About the only advantage CC has is that it's difficult for employees to steal from the register, so instead they steal the magstrips.
Wha? I get my Visa money within a day or two.
... but you could say the same thing about a lot of other areas of research, too. Face detection at Facebook's scale, for example: really cool academically and potentially really scary in application.
Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff. It only serves to give ammo for other people to monitor and control us in ways they never have before.
Luckily it should be a great business to ensure that local businesses get the right number of checkins.
There are times on HN when I laugh because people discuss things that could happen that in a practical sense stand little chance of happening. But they hang on the fact that it is possible the same way they might know someone who got ticketed for going 2 miles over the posted speed limit.
The IRS has (or had) a program called TCMP where they dissect everything on a tax return to see if it's kosher from many different angles. They will also see the "lifestyle" that you are leading and dig depending on that.
The IRS doesn't need foursquare to gather information to determine tax cheats they have other ways to do that if they wanted to. They could rely more on information on snitches or they could simply do a better job of correlating where someone lives with what they pay in taxes as a starting point (I believe they do some of this already but it's probably only at the zip code level). A good test for how they don't do this is to try and tip them off to someone who you think is cheating. Without hard evidence they won't do anything.
"check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe"
You can buy some of this data in various forms the same way any marketer does. Or you can access property records. If someone has two houses and is reporting $20k in income that's a good place to start asking questions. You could then correlate it with what their reported income is as a starting point. From everything I've seen though the IRS doesn't operate that way.
I don't like tax cheats, but a tax cheat isn't going to imprison me for having the wrong opinions.
This kind of thing is a huge deal. For decades politicians have spit-balled new laws that, even though passed, don't amount to squat because nobody can figure them out or enforce them.
The more we automate this stuff the more miserable all of our lives will be. This kind of thing is not good at all. Can emphasize enough how these technological developments are a terrible evil (and I love technology)
I find it interesting that we do this naturally and without thinking twice about it. Ten years ago the idea might have seemed preposterous.
You say that this could be yet another datapoint for the IRS to collect taxes with.
The example you use has the number of Foursquare (and I'm sure Facebook) checkins within the statistical amount of noise for the actual number of people who visit the venue.
The example you give in this thread is a corporation who undoubtably has a team of dozens if not hundreds of tax attorneys on staff to ensure that the company pays exactly the amount of tax they owe, at the federal state and local levels, and not one cent more or less.
But let's take it a step further, and say that Joe's Ajax Factory in East Blogentry, California is skimming off the register. Okay-- so now you need some city clerk in East Blogentry to run this magical data analysis software which says Joe isn't putting enough into the city coffers?
Again-- this is a laughable idea. Even if the software were completely accurate (which is impossible) and admissible for a local tax audit (which it wouldn't be), and the amount of local taxes that you recouped were more than the TCO of this software (which it wouldn't be), you're assuming that the unscrupulous store owner (undoubtably laundering money a la Office Space) would just sit back and take it?
Then a history of law breakage can be use for blackmail, threats, for silencing for coercing.
You are caught at an Occupy event and booked in. You are taken to the station and they pull up the fact that a speed camera caught you going 20 mph over speed limit. "5 years ago, it looks like IRS detected a tax discrepancy in your reporting, it would be a shame if they started an audit...maybe you should stop being involved in this movement", stuff like that.
I would almost more surprised if it won't happen sometime in the near future than if it does happen.
There's the massive intelligence collection and physical detection effort against terrorists.
There's been a more constrained system of criminal and criminal activity detection and correlation using GPS tracking, phone surveillance, drones, license plate recognition, and data mining of government and commercial databases.
The two are merging. Soon, everyone will be terrified of free speech and free association. Speech may still be free, but the government can always find some law you're violating.
As Breyer noted in his dissent in favor of granting cert in Rubin v. United States [1], "the complexity of modern federal criminal law... make it difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear... to be relevant to some such investigation." Even if you're guilty of no crimes and you have good lawyers, is participating in some political activity worth getting charged and brought to court?
Then, when the government chooses, they'll let the entire bomb drop on the guy. Of course there's also the blackmail and coercion potential (Looking at these traffic and land-use violations, you really don't want to criticize the governor in that way, do you?) It used to be that whichever party won the White House, the next year all the NGOs that supported the other party would be due for a tax audit. This increases that kind of thing by several orders of magnitude.
We voted for politicians who made promises and changes based on an existing manual system. All of those hundreds of years of voting and changing were inside of a system that doesn't exist any more. The feedback loop of the democracy was based on real humans going out there and enforcing the laws against real other humans, not the idea that whatever was said would automatically magically happen. Tom Smith in 1880 could get elected mayor on a platform of prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk because we all knew Tom, and we all knew that the entire purpose of the law was Joe, proliferate sidewalk spitter. Nobody cared about that law because once Tom got elected, he made Joe stop spitting and that was that. And who cared if it stayed on the books for the next 130 years?
But the world where laws were made by people, for people, to be enforced against people doesn't exist any more. Now we have technology that can take pictures all day long of people spitting, do facial recognition, and add it to a little file somewhere.
It's almost like we need to completely start over. We've built a machine that never could work, so it has all these patches and over-engineered pieces. Now that we're actually getting it to work, it'll eat us alive.
What is defined (in this thread) as "most cash businesses" would be to me businesses that would typically allow someone to pay with a credit card.
That wouldn't be a local bodega allowing some to pay for a pack of gum with a credit card. It would be a business allowing cc use in a typical case where the per transaction charge is not significant and you don't stand to loose business because you don't accept credit cards.
Examples:
You run a restaurant and your average ticket is $45. If you don't accept cc's you will generally loose business.
You run an ice cream stand and your average ticket is $5. Less expectation of being able to (or needing) to use a cc for a small transaction like that. Chance of loosing business: significantly less.
Say you charge the customer $5: 2% + $0.30 is $0.40--8% of the total.