A new report has revealed that the Internal Revenue Service will be checking into individual Twitter and Facebook accounts to check for improprieties. By checking social media, the IRS will be able to evaluate people claiming large deductions or those marked as potential frauds. Not all citizens should expect a friend request from their neighborhood IRS agent, but people flagged as a potential fraud may be “stalked” by IRS agents. This could start an uproar of criticism regarding its legality, but by using public, social media, all users are complicit.
The IRS is not breaking any laws if they check or begin looking at people’s social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, among many others, are all public websites and anyone with an Internet connection has the ability and right to look. By creating a Facebook account, the user has agreed to make his or her social life — or whatever components thereof he or she chooses to display— public. The IRS can legally find out if a person lied on tax returns by looking at their latest tweet or flipping through photos and posts. There is nothing wrong with proving fraud on a public domain.
Now the IRS can sift through Facebooks to make sure the taxpayer did not lie. The outcome of a Facebook search all depends on how much information the taxpayer shares online. Before the social media boom, personal lives were separated from work and business pretty easily. Future employers, as well, can “stalk” potential employees to see if they were truthful in interviews. Although the IRS can only judge whether there might be instances of fraud, employers can judge the character of potential employees through social media, and perhaps in a manner that is unfair.
Now that Facebook and Twitter are used almost universally for work and leisure, users are complicit with anyone from anywhere in the world looking at their posts and tweets. However, there should be laws or regulations that restrict the abilities of employers to force potential employees to divulge social media presences and information, unless the job requires a large social media presence. Employees should not have to change their social lives to avoid negative repercussions (within reason), but they should also maintain a professional profile, one free of excessive partying or gloats about cheating the IRS, just in case “Big Brother” is in fact watching.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
Am i allowed to simply just point out what a help to find someone who is actually mindful of what exactly they will be mentioning on the web. You without doubt know the way someone can carry a challenge to be able to mild and then make the idea significant. Added everyone has to learn this unique plus believe this unique area of the history. My spouse and i can’t think about you aren’t more frequent as you without doubt provide the gift.