Taxman’s e-vote of confidence
Saturday, April 15, 2006
April’s annual ritual of tax-filing seems a time for fresh insights. The media get to see how much money politicians personally earn, at least officially. And divorce filings - I just recently learned - traditionally hit a peak at this time, presumably because discontented spouses get to learn some financial truths, too.
One new reflection is that the whole burgeoning field of doing business online has received a massive underscoring of approval (metaphorically in some bright-colored ink, perhaps) by the Internal Revenue Service. The tax authorities, backed by Congress, say they aim to get 80 percent of the US population filing our taxes electronically by next year -- one more blow, and a pretty huge one, against high-volume paper-wastage.
A blow also for governmental cost-saving, of course. Processing an e-file return costs the IRS about 75 cents, while processing a traditional one on paper costs about $2.70.
Security and reliability are the obvious concerns that prevent converts being made among old-fashioned paper-filers. But while we not have known it, the IRS has been accepting electronic returns for 20 years now, and the IRS says no info has ever gone missing from the 500 million e-returns they have processed.
Congressional watchdogs are a bit skeptical, though. The IRS’s overall governing department, the US Treasury, was last year rated at only “D minus” for online security by the House of Representatives’ Government Reform Committee, down from “D plus” the previous year.
And there are die-hard taxpayers who will probably never switch from paper. When Lillie Coney, Senior Policy Analyst with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was asked if she files electronically, she said: “Oh, no. I don't bungie-jump either.”
SEARCHING - OR SPYING?
We’ve heard a lot about how Yahoo, MSN and – at first reluctantly – Google have been prepared to share information with the federal Government about their customers’ use of their search engines. This in the arguably just cause of law enforcement work to combat the sexual abuse of children. Internet companies have also been publicly criticized for sharing customer information of a much more generalized nature with another, very different government – that of the People’s Republic of China. But how aware have we been of what cahoots the communications giant AT&T has gotten into with this country’s National Security Agency?
A reliable and long-employed AT&T retiree called Mark Klein reports that there’s a disturbing operation going on continuously in the company’s internet and telephone hub in San Francisco. Here, and apparently in other similar hubs throughout the country, the NSA can mine as much data as it wants, culled from our phone calls, our emails and any of our web-surfing. The agency also has access to AT&T’s proprietary, 300-plus terabyte database known as “Daytona”.
The NSA’s surveillance of our private communications is, we all know, circumscribed by law – and we also know, from President Bush’s recently revealed approach, how much that counts for. But with a commercial entity like AT&T, Joe Public seems on even less secure ground. There’s no way at all of knowing what safeguards are or are not being invoked to protect our privacy.
So it’s with great interest that I’ll be watching the progress of a lawsuit, Electronic Frontier Foundation v AT&T. The advocacy group seeks damages from the company on behalf of customers who claim their communications have been spied on without a warrant. The class action says the spying began soon after September 11, 2001.