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March 21, 2006

Selling your information...to a Marketing Agency?

If taxes weren't stressful and complicated enough, now we are being targeted for our personal and financial information. This new proposal from the IRS allows the tax payer to sell their information to marketers and data brokers, for a price. If this law passes it would require a signature from you the tax payer. California Conservative points out around tax time many people are in such a rush to sign forms they do not fully read or understand exactly what they are consenting to.

The Seattle Times reports: “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers, for the first time, will be able to sell information from individual returns — or even entire returns — to marketers and data brokers.”

The possible change is raising alarm among consumer and privacy-rights advocates. It was included in a set of proposed rules that the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them “not a significant regulatory action.”

IRS officials portray the proposed changes as house-cleaning measures needed to update outmoded regulations that were adopted before the IRS began accepting returns electronically. The proposed rules, which would become effective 30 days after a final version is published, would require a tax preparer to obtain written consent before selling tax information.

California Conservative

What kind of rules are these? After all, who would give consent to selling their private information and why? It’s not like the client would be compensated for it. Which makes it even more suspicious, because a tax preparer wouldn’t want to make a big deal of it. Just slip it in, so to speak.

As marketing and consumerism propels our huge economy, it seems the lines are blurring for us, the people. What role do we play in US society and economy? Are we now seen as merely consumers? What about the value of just being a citizen?

Privacy Taxes,
Selling Tax Information

Posted by Sophie at March 21, 2006 03:45 PM

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Posted by: ADIPEX at March 30, 2006 03:33 AM

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