The IRS Wants To Use Facebook And Instagram To Catch Tax Evaders

Looking at the social media profile of famous “influencers” can sometimes make you feel envious. This is because it looks like all that person is doing is traveling around the world, eating nice food, being given free stuff, and basically enjoying life. How there are some influencers who warn that what you see might not necessarily tell the whole story, and that those are just snippets of their life.

However the IRS thinks that there could be some clues within our social media profiles that could tell whether or not that person is evading their taxes. This is according to request for information issued earlier this month by the IRS’s National Office of Procurement, where they suggest that our social media activity could be used as a way to glean our potential income sources that we might not have declared.

According to the IRS, “Businesses and individuals increasingly use social media to advertise, promote, and sell products and services. For example, taxpayers can create ‘online stores’ on social networking sites free of cost. Much of this information is unrestricted, allowing the public, businesses and various governmental agencies to discover taxpayers’ locations and income sources.”

Now before you get too worried about the IRS reading too much into your life, the current policy regarding using research using social media is “largely prohibitive”, and that workers are not allowed to create fake accounts to perform compliance-related tasks. That being said, it’s probably not a good idea to evade your taxes to begin with, so if you’re someone who’s always been on the up and up, we guess this shouldn’t really be much of an issue.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Instagram, Legal