"Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff."
There are times on HN when I laugh because people discuss things that could happen that in a practical sense stand little chance of happening. But they hang on the fact that it is possible the same way they might know someone who got ticketed for going 2 miles over the posted speed limit.
The IRS has (or had) a program called TCMP where they dissect everything on a tax return to see if it's kosher from many different angles. They will also see the "lifestyle" that you are leading and dig depending on that.
The IRS doesn't need foursquare to gather information to determine tax cheats they have other ways to do that if they wanted to. They could rely more on information on snitches or they could simply do a better job of correlating where someone lives with what they pay in taxes as a starting point (I believe they do some of this already but it's probably only at the zip code level). A good test for how they don't do this is to try and tip them off to someone who you think is cheating. Without hard evidence they won't do anything.
"check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe"
You can buy some of this data in various forms the same way any marketer does. Or you can access property records. If someone has two houses and is reporting $20k in income that's a good place to start asking questions. You could then correlate it with what their reported income is as a starting point. From everything I've seen though the IRS doesn't operate that way.
Comments
"Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff."
There are times on HN when I laugh because people discuss things that could happen that in a practical sense stand little chance of happening. But they hang on the fact that it is possible the same way they might know someone who got ticketed for going 2 miles over the posted speed limit.
The IRS has (or had) a program called TCMP where they dissect everything on a tax return to see if it's kosher from many different angles. They will also see the "lifestyle" that you are leading and dig depending on that.
The IRS doesn't need foursquare to gather information to determine tax cheats they have other ways to do that if they wanted to. They could rely more on information on snitches or they could simply do a better job of correlating where someone lives with what they pay in taxes as a starting point (I believe they do some of this already but it's probably only at the zip code level). A good test for how they don't do this is to try and tip them off to someone who you think is cheating. Without hard evidence they won't do anything.
"check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe"
You can buy some of this data in various forms the same way any marketer does. Or you can access property records. If someone has two houses and is reporting $20k in income that's a good place to start asking questions. You could then correlate it with what their reported income is as a starting point. From everything I've seen though the IRS doesn't operate that way.