Summary
Elon Musk has requested access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, which contains personal tax information for millions of Americans.
The request has not yet been granted but has raised alarm among privacy experts and government officials.
Critics fear Musk could misuse the data, especially given his existing federal contracts. The IRS is considering a memorandum to permit access, despite strict rules against unauthorized viewing.
A federal judge has already blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury data, but other agencies remain vulnerable.
Glad I filed my taxes last weekend. Just got my state return and my federal soon. Considering 1,000 people got laid off at the IRS with tax season people will be waiting months for their returns
I started mine early but I’m still waiting for tax documents to arrive, ugh
I’m shocked they even asked
They figured they would try before they took it anyway just in case they could get some good PR
He has got to go.
For what reason? How does accessing individual taxpayers private income/tax information allow you weed out wasteful government spending?
Theoretically (not wasteful spending, but corruption) - by noticing unexplainable incomes of government employees and relatives of those and politicians and their relatives. In practice - I don’t think they can be caught this easily.
Also it is a huge dataset from which one can have some insights on how to, well, optimize taxes and tax returns for whatever goal one wishes.
In practice others have already answered that.
By arbitrarily denying regular people their tax returns for the sake of “saving money”
Yup. Tax refunds are about to become a thing of the past. For the bottom 99%, that is.
IRS audits for politically motivated reasons are about to become a thing.
And tampering for cover-ups.
I don’t think there’s anything “arbitrary” about who they fuck over.
nope. they know exactly who they are targeting. Black, gay, trans, women, poor people.
Since when has musk asked for anything? Aside from gov subsidies of course.
I think he should get access to it.
I think everyone should get access to it.
That’s how we do it in Scandinavia. It’s been good for fighting corruption.
If your neighbour has a brand new Lamborghini in his driveway, while filling an income of 20k€ the last year. Maybe ask the IRS to look a bit closer at his finances.
I use it to see how much my colleagues make, so I have a leg to stand on in salary negotiations.
The only way the Trump administration is going to do anything about people cheating on their taxes is to pardon them for it.
Well, if they are from the right class. I’m not sure that offer applies to the peasants.
That’s not how it works here… Don’t pretend and welcome his horseshit. This is probably about making a personal enemies list
Also very convenient for criminals to target wealthy people and scam or rob them?
You know what’s even more convenient?
Scammers from poorer countries just targeting the elderly and retired in richer countries. You know, like they currently do.
What’s with the fear mongering about a system that’s been shown to reduce corruption? Do you like corruption? Do you like people cheating the benefits system?
Good point: a lot of theft stems from people reading tax returns and robbing the rich. That’s why high-income neighborhoods also have the highest crime 🙄
Well, the Lambo in the driveway will be more obvious than publicly accessible tax records.
There are plenty of wealthy people who keep a low profile though.
The same argument that’s been parroted by right wing parties here for decades. However it doesn’t really mesh well with reality. Not that right wing parties ever really cared about reality.
You can find the rich people by driving to the best part of town. If they stop you from going further you’ve found the wealthy people.
That does sound like a good system.
In a fair democracy, sure. But the US ain’t that; I wouldn’t be surprised if they used donation write-offs to target political opponents.
Political donations are generally not tax deductible so wouldn’t show up on the returns.
You’ve misunderstood; Donations to charities like The Trevor Project are deductible, and would be very much considered political.
Most of the world also requires annual reports to be made public
Fuck Musk and ship him back to South Africa without a US passport.
Fuck Musk but this thing of shipping people around is crap. Just jail him like any regular criminal.
Nah, just put him in one of those idiot squishers like the Titan-1C that took out a handful of billionaires last year.
Seize everything he owns down to the last penny. He now has to work an entry level job for minimum wage.
No. Fuck no.
He’ll get it
All Americans should freeze your credit immediately.
All Americans should have their credit frozen in general. You can unfreeze it any time you want to make a big finance decision like a mortgage but there’s no reason to just leave it out there the rest of the time.
The thing that makes me hesitant about a freeze is losing the code somehow. Not sure what to do if that happens.
That ads friction to the economy, which is why credit was invented.
If we all just started a grassroots campaign in which EVERYONE freezes their credit in March, it will not be awesome for banks.
Why is it bad for banks?
It would slow down spending in the economy simply by being a slight barrier to people getting new credit cards or buying new things. Large banks are also credit card servicers, so they would see direct impacts.
They are worming their way through the various departments looking for something…dirt on their opponents?
Probably dirt on everyone. And just to farm for their own purposes. Collate all the federal data, pump it into his grok LLM, and try to create his own file on every consumer.
Right, propaganda had to be aimed at the average citizen, or at least the average citizen of a few major groups or layers. A huge headache. With enough data one can have personalized propaganda.
It’s only the Web and customer UI\UX which are now “one size fits all” and becoming worse, with things really important for these companies they are doing their job properly.
I mean, that’s where it was always going, since “big data” was a new buzzword, and neural nets were something only geeks cared about, with no commercial hype visible. When Bitcoin seemed a new anarchist (right anarchism is still that) thing, and The Silk Road was operational.
Why - because it was about advertising and insights for companies about customers, and also about creating a non-neutral medium from a social network, or in our current existence from the Web itself. A non-neutral medium is where your messages get effectively lost or amplified or distorted, depending on some policy.
You as a customer or a user don’t need that to make your choice with whom to talk or what to buy. These destinations are all real, and thus a social media company doesn’t need any information to “create” them. If they are distorting them, then they are distorting your own choices. They are stealing from you, in fact. This is violence and was always going towards the sad state of affairs we have now.
And I think it’s worse than what people say about “fascism” or “cronyism” or whatever.
AI generated dossiers, terrifying. Imagine all the crimes the AI can hallucinate a person did. And with generative audiovisual AI can manufacturer the evidence.
I don’t think it’s about that, even Musk isn’t this dumb. It’s about AI-generated individual profiles for propaganda and surveillance. One can play a person having studied them well enough. And turns out that of this LLMs are capable.
While Elon might not do this, he has lackeys that aren’t scrupled. And maybe Trump has a meddlesome priest he wants Elon to take away. I’m not very optimistic about the current regime.
What you said is a subset of what I said, so I didn’t say you were wrong, just that it’s not everything. Point being, I said I think it’s worse. Didn’t sleep well, so my grammar is atrocious.
Wow I hate this.
Hes good at doing things that look effective to slow ppl
Why?
AI-powered audits on “everyone”, but the source code and weights will be secret and it’ll disproportionately target liberals.
The greatest question. There could be good answers. I don’t expect much.
Maybe the sovcits were inadvertently on to something.
inadvertently
I think their ideology, despite a set of religious beliefs, is about exactly what’s happening without this word you used.
Oh, I’m sure it’s all for good reasons of “efficiency” and more of fElon’s altruism and deep concern for the country.
🙄
And he’ll get that access, I guarantee it. Hope I’m wrong.
You’re not wrong We’re fucked. I’m waiting for everyone else to get mad enough to revolt with me. Fuck Elon Musk. No one voted for that cunt.
