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Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons I will never use a tax preparation product online. Nor will I file online through the IRS's "secure" system. Even the downloadables are open to shenanigans behind the scenes, so it's not the best option either.

At some point, it's possible that one or more IRS databases themselves will be breached. This may (?) cause a re-evaluation of the risks the US government is subjecting its citizens to by collecting and storing such large volumes of financial data.

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Just make everyone's tax returns public. That's what Norway, Sweden and Finland do. Society hasn't collapsed when people know how much money their neighbor makes.

In the US, lottery winners are advised to remain private because of the significant increase in crime targeting public lottery winners; it's certainly not society collapsing when rich people get robbed, but I'm wondering if criminals in the Scandinavian countries use the tax returns for picking targets?

I imagine it happens. I remember a kidnapping of a wealthy young inheritor in Finland ten years ago... But that crime got so much attention because it was so unique.

Anyway, isn’t it much easier for criminals to pick a target by simply going into a wealthy neighborhood? The American rich are much more segregated than their Scandinavian counterparts. That’s a more obvious target on their back than having tax data available on request.

They don't stop at putting gates up. They also have more police patrols, surveillance, and awareness of people who are out of place.

The ultrawealthy are certainly more segregated, but for upper-middle-class it's not unusual to see a factor of 10x difference in household income in the same neighborhood (e.g. $25-30k per year for a single parent or retiree vs $250-$300k per year total for two married professionals).

[edit]

For some data, you can look at primary school districts (which are almost always geographically assigned in the US, and are usually much smaller than secondary school districts). They tend to have statistics on percentage of students that qualify for government subsidized meal programs, which is a good proxy for poverty. I'm well above this line, but have lived in districts where the numbers were as high as 91% and as low as 5%.

I don’t get the motivation behind keeping tax returns secret. It’s like your phone number: I wouldn’t post it to Reddit, but if someone can find it somewhere it’s no big deal to me. I don’t understand the threat model, besides the edge cases others mentioned like lottery winners.

My earnings are my business, not yours. My neighbors don’t need to know either.

So you print it, send it in the mail, and then the IRS receives it and OCR's it back into the database you dont want the data in?

Yes, but I get some satisfaction in making them go out of their way to do it.

And no way in hell am I giving the information to Intuit first, so that they can mine and sell it (and probably leak it unintentionally as well)

There is no OCR in play. Real human beings handle code & edit of returns. Real human beings also check for errors at that time, too.

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