Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency requested access to an IRS data system that retains the personal tax information on millions of Americans, sources say.
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.
From someone who took Records and Information Management years ago, this is a huge red flag and everyone in the US should be alarmed and pissed off about this.
Elon and his DOGE fools have no right to have access to American’s IRS records.
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.
Musky’s audit has shown the billionaires are actually owed money from the government. Thankfully, those professionally weekend trained auditors confirmed that the working class owes billions in taxes.
The working class has two options: come with the money or be sent to a work camp to pay off the ever increasing tax debt.
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.
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 🙄
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?
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.
First thing that came to mind for me is going after retired federal employees, veterans, etc. Also locating immigrants, even if they're here legally with documentation.
So given that his little team of unqualified racist have already proven to leak classified data and can't secure a server with even basic security that someone on the homeserver community would do, it would be funny if this is how Trump's tax returns would come out to light.
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.
AI generated dossiers, terrifying. Imagine all the crimes the AI can hallucinate a person did. And with generative audiovisual AI can manufacturer the evidence.
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.
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.
He wants to live like common people.
He wants to see whatever common people see.
— he’s never paid any tax, so he obviously wants to live vicariously with the eyes of the poors. Not as one though, just wants to get closer to understanding them by looking at their tax returns, illegally.
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