[haswell]

> The idea is to require banks, credit unions and other providers of financial services to track and submit information to the IRS about the total inflows and outflows of every account

> The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals.

This seems quite different than "tracking purchases", online or not. As far as I can tell, they're looking to identify movement of money between accounts that would indicate behavior meant to skirt taxes.

I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases".

Did this ever actually go into effect? Looks like this was all just a proposal at the time the article was written.

[Test0129]

Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point

> Reports submitted by banks to the IRS would break down the numbers to include physical-cash transactions per account, any transactions with a foreign account and transactions between accounts held by the same owner. The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals.

This implies tracking of purchases. In particular, a half-awake person will use cash to make transactions they don't want someone to know about. It doesn't take much digging to correlate a cash transaction to something if you know a few more details.

At any rate:

> I'm never excited about moves that involve more tracking of individuals, but I also don't think it's fair to characterize this as "tracking purchases".

It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy.

[haswell]

> Literally in the next paragraph it invalidates your point

How so? The quote you just pasted includes what I already quoted - specifically that the IRS does not receive details on individual transactions. Here's another article that explores this and the common misrepresentation of the proposal as well [0].

Your bank already tracks your purchases. They must do so to know how much money you have now, and how much you'll have after you make a purchase. That would not change. They also cannot see what you do with your cash - that will also not change.

The thing that seems new (and again, still potentially concerning, but also potentially reasonable), is that gross totals will be shared.

> It is exactly tracking purchases. Whether it's disguised as "tax data" or "purchases" the fact is they know it. Splitting hairs is exactly what they want you to do to distract you from yet another incursion into our right to privacy.

Given two scenarios, one in which a full list of your individual transactions are sent to the IRS, and one in which aggregate inflow/outflow data is provided to the IRS, are you really arguing that these are the same, or that distinguishing between them is splitting hairs? Another framing would be that this is looking for an accurate representation of what's actually going on.

How would you distinguish some hypothetical future policy that involves actually tracking/sending individual purchases from this one that does not do such a thing?

But this all feels like a conversation of dubious value since we're discussing an article that talks about a proposal that hadn't yet been finalized at the time of writing.

I'm not saying there aren't things to ask questions about there, but I am saying that getting the details right matters.

- [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/09/29/fac...

[mikeyouse]

It doesn't "imply" tracking transactions rather specifically says they aren't going to track transactions. From your own quote:

> The IRS wouldn't receive details on individual transactions but, rather, gross yearly totals.

The banks will just have to provide a total account breakdown, e.g.:

John Doe 2022 - Account 1 Report: $10,000 to foreign banks, $6,000 received in cash, $3,000 sent to John Doe Account 2.

[shuntress]

What do you mean by a "half-awake person"?

Also, cash purchases do not interact in any way with your bank account so I still do not see how this is tracking purchases.