If they don’t have all of it, it’s a shortage.
The biggest reasons I can see where a marketer might want access to this information: it is more complete and accurate than data from other sources.
For one, you’re getting a list of people with incomes. That is, customers. No more sending magazines to dogs or credit cards to children.
For two, the government can enforce the accuracy of the information (that bit at the bottom that says “I certify that the above information is true and accurate, subject to charges of fraud and paying fines of not less than 20 zorkmids and having a bear carrying a shark put into my pants”) at taxpayer cost.
As long as it is “do not sell” by default and opt-in to sell — and tax preparers aren’t allowed to make sale of your data a condition of doing business — I don’t see the big deal.
My personal guess is that some preparer will find a way to do this. The easy way I can see is a multi-page contract signed at the beginning of the process filled with useless fine print and containing the clause in the middle. Courts aren’t favorably disposed to people who sign things without reading and understanding them-yet people do that all the time. The business world would grind to a halt if people actually read all the contracts they clicked through or signed.
Actually, after consulting Bor, it’s looks like there is one Company that routinely does have it’s customer sign a stack of things, and has enough cleints to make it worthwhile to sell the data. See, most tax dudes have maybe 100 clients. Not worth it to buy that data. But there is one well known national chain, whose name rimes with “crock” who does have a huge number of dudes come in- who is known to be not entirely scrupulous, and who does have it’s clients sign a stack of waivers and such. So, this changes seems to be input primarily to benefit those dudes.
Furthermore, if I were I&S Crock, I wouldn’t bother with the discount. I’d just require 3 signatures if the customer did not want to share information for quality assurance purposes and the like.
If I was a used car dealer, I would pay good money (to a data compiler) to gleen the income of the mark who just walked in. Ditto if I was selling or brokering real estate.
Knowledge that the mark gave away (or even sold) such information (and for how much) would also be useful in a variety of negotiating contexts.
You’d think so, but my experience just doesn’t support that. For example, when I buy a car I always finance at the dealership. I’ve never had a dealership ‘mine’ their data and try and sell me another car after I’ve made the last payment of the first one. I think that would be a really good time to call someone and try and sell them a new car. Just when they’ve finished paying one off. This information is right in the dealer’s own system and is easily extracted, but I’ve never had one who bothered to use it. So I can’t see them paying a dime to buy it.
As for real estate, knowing their income isn’t going to help you at all. If the house costs $800,000 you already know they are rich. If they are looking at $120,000 houses, you know they are relatively poor. Rich people are looking to pay fair market value and are not going to overpay just because they can. They didn’t get rich by being stupid about money. So what value to you is knowing their exact income? None, really.
I would find the idea of an administration that has such a hard-on for classifying, and re-classifying, as much information as possible has no problem making citizens’ information easy as pie to obtain slightly ironic, but irony and government divorced so long ago, I doubt that either remembers the other, let alone the marriage.*
I am currently studying accounting, and I do not see how this would help either the client or the accountant. I think it would create even more reluctance of people to provide information - which could help raise revenue I suppose if enough people decide to just take standard deductions over itemizing.
AP
*Please don’t make me diagram that sentence. I promise it wont happen again.