The Canada Revenue Agency is the equivalent of the IRS in the states. Unlike the IRS, it tends to move forward with innovate tax solutions. Recently, it announced a new technique for finding people that owe back taxes. Yep, the program surfs the internet looking for posts made by the people that might lead the government to them. Canada is undertaking the program jointly with the tax agencies for the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Demark and Austria.



The program in question is called Xenon, not to be confused with Xena the warrior princess on television. The program works by taking the names of ?missing? taxpayers and hunting for them on the net. It trolls through forums, porn sites, auction sites, gambling sites and just about anywhere someone might drop their name.

There are, of course, a couple of problems with the internet sweep approach. First off, most people don't use their real names when posting given the threat of identity theft. Second, the issue of privacy rights certainly would seem to come up, particularly if the program hacks into protected membership areas. Nobody has any answers to these issues because it is not entirely clear how the program works. Still, you can expect some controversy in the future.

If you don't live in Canada or these other countries, you are probably wondering why you should care about this at all. Well, citizens of the United States should be on alert. The IRS annually reports tax gaps of hundreds of billions of dollars. A good percentage of this is due to people that just stop paying taxes. The IRS does not have the manpower to track all of them down, but things could become much easier if a simple computer could do it for them. If this occurs, all heck is going to break out for a lot of people. Imagine bidding on stuff on EBay only to find your debit card and bank account have been frozen!

In truth, people that don't pay taxes only have themselves to blame. Still, the idea of the government sweeping the web for information is a more than a little troubling.