States Mining Data To Boost Tax Revenue
from the knew-that-data-mining-stuff-was-useful-for-something... dept
Found over at Politech is this news article about how local governments, amazignly desperate for tax revenue are turning to data mining tools to find out where people cheated them out of tax dough. As an example, they talk about a guy who was "caught" after LA officials sorted through 324,000 documents to discover that he owed (wait for it...) $100 in a tax he didn't even know existed. Apparently, the same sort of systems are being used to track down people who buy things in sales-tax free states and ship it into other states. So, for those of you who have been buying things online via merchants who don't charge sales tax, you may suddenly discover a tax bill on your doorstep from your money hungry state government.
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