CPA blogger Bill Murray of April 15.com alerts us to a Wall Street Journal article in which the author, Laura Sanders, reports that
[S]tate Tax Collection Agents in Minnesota, Nebraska and even here in California have used Social Media sites such as My Space and Facebook to obtain information that have helped them to collect thousands of dollars owed in back taxes.
In Minnesota, authorities were able to levy back taxes on the wages of a long-sought tax evader after he announced on MySpace that he would be returning to his home town to work as a real-estate broker and gave his employer’s name. The state collected several thousand dollars, the full amount due.
Meanwhile, agents in Nebraska collected $2,000 from a deejay after he advertised on his MySpace page that he would be working at a big public party.
If the tax man is on Facebook and MySpace, he’s probably snooping around elsewhere on the web, too:
Now, when a tax dodger can’t be found, said Nebraska tax official Steven Schroeder, agents often turn to Google. One agent collected $30,000 of unpaid tax from a resident after a Google search found him listed as a high-ranking local marketing rep for a national firm. If a Google online search isn’t productive, agents use the social sites or chat rooms in a last-chance hunt for their quarries.
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1 IRS Uses Twitter, Facebook and Google Street Map to Catch Tax Cheats // Mar 17, 2010 at 8:39 am
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