Admit it - you are secretly bummed that for all the trouble you put into your blog posts or your posts on Twitter and Facebook, no one seems to care enough to want to say something. Well, start rejoicing, you have a new fan in the IRS. Is this a case of " Be careful what you wish for", or what? So here's what's happening - state agents of the IRS, have just discovered that searching through the major social networking hubs, for information on where you just moved house to, or for innocent boasts of financial success, are a great way to track you down and ask you how you're doing with all that new money. How exactly? In Ohio, they've been after this insurance broker for all the IRS tax debt he had racked up for years, skipping from one place to another. They just had Twitter watching their back. He just made one false move, declaring on Twitter his intent to come back to the town he grew up in, in Ohio, and taking up with a popular insurance firm, and the IRS tax people were on this case in an instant. Not only did they find him, they also collected everything they were due for the past years.
Or how about the party planner in Wyoming who thought it would be a great way to advertise her skills, to spread it far and wide on MySpace that it was her, that was behind a big social event that everyone was talking about? California has had particular success with this. They've been so hard up over the past year, they've been paying their bills with notes. The IRS tax collection agents go the extra mile to help the state out, and do a little research on the Internet to find the name they're looking for anywhere - comments on a professional blog, hobby websites someone might post messages on, and so on. With the right amount of googling on social networking websites and other places, the IRS usually find their man.
An IRS tax delinquent search usually begins with a little look-see into what a delinquent person's public records might turn up in the DMV records, bank or employment records, Social Security and so on. And then of course there is the regular kind of shoe leather - talking to street vendors in a general area, realty brokers and so on. They just turn into regular detectives to get where they need to go. Sometimes, just looking someone up on the Internet turns them up right away. But of course, they're not always allowed to use all the means possible. In some states, they can't go and snoop into anyone's private records. Only information available on fairly public places like Twitter or MySpace, are allowed. Facebook meanwhile, makes it easy for most people to turn their settings private, and they do. And then the IRS can't look there. For instance, a government representative can't go online, pretend to be just a regular person, and try to finesse some information out of a tax evader. A government representative would have to tell the truth.
Some states are still a little squeamish about doing this; they wonder if there could be some kind of hidden illegality to it. Pretty soon, most states should come around to trying all possibilities on the Internet, and strike IRS tax-delinquent pay dirt.