Lithuania taxman uses Google Maps to find dodgers
As soon as Google Maps Street View was
rolled out in Lithuania earlier this year, tax authorities were ready.
Sitting in the comfort of their own
offices, inspectors used the free Internet program for a virtual cruise around
the streets of some of the Baltic country's big cities, uncovering dozens of
alleged tax violations involving housing construction and property sales.
They identified 100 homeowners and 30
construction companies as suspected tax dodgers thanks to Street View, finding
homes where they shouldn't be and other suspicious activity, Darius Buta,
spokesman for the State Tax Inspectorate, said Wednesday.
"Our inspectors track these buildings
on the Internet, and if a violation seems obvious, they visit the sites. This
saves lots of time and resources," Buta said.
Lithuanian officials said they were unaware
of any other country where revenue collectors had used Google's Street View,
saying they didn't draw on anyone else's experience. Still, tax authorities
across the world are turning to high-resolution maps, online databases, and
social media in a bid to catch out cheats.
In the United States, the Internal Revenue
Service has said it would be cross-referencing information from taxpayers'
Facebook and Twitter accounts if their returns threw up any red flags.
In Britain, tax officials have revealed
they are using Web crawling software to trawl auction websites for undeclared
sales, while in Greece authorities have been using satellite imagery to locate
undeclared swimming pools in wealthy neighborhoods.
Among the tax cheats caught in Lithuania
were a couple in Kaunas, Lithuania's second largest city, who didn't register
the sale of buildings and avoided 240,000 litas ($91,000) in taxes, said
Vaimaira Jakiene, the coordinator of the new program.
Another couple declared a sale of land but
didn't mention a new house built on the property that was sold via a separate
deal, said Jakienie. They are looking at a tax bill of 130,000 ($50,000), she
added.
Tax officials said they planned to use
Street View to take a peek at properties purchased from dubious construction
companies over the past two years.
Google has had scrapes with European
governments over Street View, with the Germans and French in particular
concerned that the company's practice of deploying camera-mounted cars and
bicycles to collect images and information for the application intrudes on
privacy.
But the Lithuanian revenue agency dismissed
any claims that its new approach violated privacy rights.
"We conducted precise legal
consultations. There are no rights violations," Buta said, added that tax
authorities also discussed privacy and security concerns with Google officials
in Lithuania.
Human rights advocates in the Baltic state
seemed to agree.
"We do not see violations here since
inspectors use the Google application only to look at suspicious places — then
they visit them," said Karolis Liutkevicius, a lawyer at the Human Rights
Monitoring Institute in Vilnius. "If they were using it as the sole tool,
then it could possibly be qualified as a violation. But in this case it's just
using a modern resource."
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