A taxing time...

I recently wrote about my experience being audited by the Irish taxman.
This "story" got a huge amount of exposure and ended up on the front page of the two major Sunday newspapers in Ireland. This was followed by articles in another Irish newspaper on Monday and mentions in a raft of other Irish media (radio, blogs etc.).
The story was even picked up in my homecountry, The Netherlands, and got a similar level of exposure there. It was featured in several newspapers, blogs and on an online radiostation.
In the days following this I was asked by a lot of people if I wasn't afraid of "offending" the taxman. To be honest i was a bit taken aback by all the media exposure but seeing that I was not critical at all of the taxman i expected it to be taken in good spirits.
Obviously I was wrong.....
Yesterday a big brown enveloppe from the Irish revenue Commissioners arrived in my mailbox. It contained a lot of forms and a covering letter. It now turns out that they are auditing my personal finances.
I am expected to produce within the next 21 days:
- Records relating to all my sources of income from 1/1/05 to 31/12/07
- Bank, credit card & loan statements from 1/1/05 to 21/12/07
Now again, let me repeat that I have nothing to hide and am not reluctant to provide this information. However it is a huge pain in the behind and will take up quite some time to collate. These people don't seem to realise that I have other things to do....

The power of blogging.....

I put a post up here last week on my experiences with the Irish Tax auditors and how they use social & business networking profiles as basis for an audit. It was a quick post made without too much though. I did NOT expect loads of hits or feedback.
I can now see how wrong I was.....
The story was first picked up on Friday and included in Damien Mulley's "fluffy links". Since then it has been on the front page of two major Sunday papers, mentioned (and discussed) twice on Irish radio and was included in last Monday's Irish Independent newspaper.
Internationally (yes!) it has been mentioned on an Dutch radio programme and has been listed on two Dutch news websites.
It has off course also been picked up by a number of blogs and today it made www.valleywag.com
I just hope that the taxman realises that I am not being paid for this!

For those interested following are links to some of the sites mentioning the story:
http://tinyurl.com/2ejwy3
http://tinyurl.com/yvar6s
http://tinyurl.com/yrmfas

Irish Tax office catches up with web 2.0...

I had the great pleasure this morning of being subject to a tax audit.
It was announced by a letter that I received a few weeks ago so it wasn't a surprise.
What was a surprise was the fact that the person conducting the audit had printouts of all my online networking profiles. That's Linkedin, Xing, Facebook etc.
I ended up being questioned on the content of these profiles. Not that I have anything to hide but some content was out of date leading to some digging (no not on www.digg.com)by the tax people.
This really annoyed me and I clearly pointed out that these profiles held no legal validity and if they had no right to use them as part of an audit.
It adds another chapter though in the number of privacy issues for people using online networking sites. Not only can friends, foes and potential employers view and use your profile information and activities, now the tax office will use this information also....
Scary really....