State tax officials are using AI to go after wealthy payers | Hacker News Reader

State tax officials are using AI to go after wealthy payers

cnbc.com

16 pointsperihelions9 comments

I do not understand the universe in which “AI” is needed for this.

Putting aside the “remote workers should pay local taxes” issue, which even to me, a pro-taxation person, seems questionable (this is also different from ‘I claim to work remotely/live in another state but I actually spend most of my time in NY, etc’), it’s still not hard, and certainly does not require “AI”.

Checking for “business X reports paying person B, and person B’s tax return does not match what you would reasonably ball park it as (or they didn’t file a return you believe they should)” does not require “AI”.

At the very top of the article there are Key Points bullets:

* The state is sending out hundreds of thousands of AI-generated letters looking for revenue, many of them focused on remote work or a change in tax residency.

And in paragraph 9 of 13:

> Klein said state tax auditors and AI programs are examining cellphone records to see where the taxpayers spent most of their time and lived most of their lives.

I think the argument isn't that AI is required but that AI is more convenient/efficient then alternative methods for these same tasks.

this is still just 'is A > B' cruft. Why add a pile of opaque superfluous - and presumably challengeable and likely biased - AI nonsense to that when you could just go "do your cell/rent/bank/travel records show you in the state for a suspiciously large proportion of the time you claim to be non resident", and then use that very clear, unambiguous, and free of hidden training set bias as the basis for determining whether people are sufficiently present to justify audits or a more deep investigation.

AI is just "let's create an opaque statistical model from biased source data" and say Good Luck! The first thing I would do if subject to any AI driven legal action would be to demand that they prove that the system isn't biased against me on the basis of protected characteristics which they could not do, and literally every study has verified that "AI" always exacerbates bias in the training set, because AI is not intelligent, all it is doing is creating a statistical model that reflects the training set.

> Why add a pile of opaque superfluous - and presumably challengeable and likely biased - AI nonsense

There are a lot of signs that people put effort into hiding, so an aggressive statistical matcher is better on that front than manual tests.

> literally every study has verified that "AI" always exacerbates bias

If only it was that straightforward, or you could use an extra concentrated AI to subtract bias.

> Klein said state tax auditors and AI programs are examining cellphone records to see where the taxpayers spent most of their time and lived most of their lives.

State tax auditors have access to cellphone data? Like without a warrant?

If marketers can buy your geo data, then what stops the IRS?

I was assuming the law.

Perhaps, but it's a toothless restriction circumvented by parallel construction. I don't sympathize at all with tax dodgers, but one bit of good they can do for society is to help stop the vast amount of data harvesting and sales in the first place.

Then and only then will it be difficult for government agencies to work around these Constitutional protections.

#1 FICO delivered a score for irs cheating 25 yrs ago results that were so accurate the IRS dropped it. #2 "the wealthy" pfffft, I call nonsense. Some wealthy, but I bet 95% of the revenue will come from the middle class that do not know how, nor have the time, to fight the AI accusations. #3 how are they examining phone records without concent?

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