You might want to think twice about posting online images of your new big boat, or expensive car or vacation, or major home renovations.
It’s now been revealed that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is scanning social media sites for information that would suggest your lifestyle doesn’t match your reported income.
The CRA is busy analyzing data on taxpayers from its own internal sources but also from “publicly available” sources like Facebook, and Twitter.
Toronto tax lawyer Philippe DioGuardi says, “Every ad you click on, every search term you enter into your browser, every site you visit leaves a permanent record that the Canada Revenue Agency can request to view, through legal channels”.
He also notes that, “If you’re clicking on sponsored ads with headlines like ‘Breaking Income Tax Law? – and by the way that’s a real headline – you’ve just raised your hand and suggested that you might have something to hide from the CRA. And suddenly you’re at the head of the class for an audit or investigation”.
Quoted by the CBC, David Walters a CRA spokesman said the Agency “does practice risk-based compliance, so for taxpayers identified as high risk, any relevant, publicly available information relating to the specific risk-based factors for the taxpayer may be consulted as part of our fact-gathering processes,”
In a 2016-17 Report on Planning and Priorities former CRA commissioner Andrew Treusch says new technology , including “mining accessible data” can improve compliance with tax payment, “Data analysis and business intelligence are providing us with better insight into taxpayer behaviours, allowing us to spend less time and effort on lower-risk groups of taxpayers and focus our resources on dealing with deliberate non-compliance.”
The CRA business intelligence section has also begun “text analytics” (text mining) to detect new schemes to avoid taxes.
Several privacy experts have expressed deep concern about these practices. Colin Bennett is among them. Quoted by the CBC the University of Victoria professor who specializes in privacy says,
“You are getting beyond the initial reason why the data were collected in the first place, which is to administer our tax system, and it is becoming far more hypothetical, far more speculative and concerning.”
Additional information- sources
- CBC-Elizabeth Thompson (CRA monitoring Facebook, Twitter of some Canadians)
- Financial Post- Fabio Campanella (Is the CRA creeping your Facebook page?)
- DioGuardi- Toronto tax lawyer (Can the CRA see my internet searches?)
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.