The Gray Monk

« Back to the future | Main | Trinity Sunday »

June 02, 2007

Big Brother is taxing you...

Trust the bureaucrats to look after themselves. In Germany they've just invented a new Federal authority, the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern (BZSt). With lots of cosy jobs for pen pushers, to be sure. Up till now the tax offices in local authority districts were responsible for keeping the tax records of the people living there.You were issued a tax number and if you for example moved to another district you had to apply for a new number. That makes keeping track of an individual not an easy task, of course.

So someone had a brainwave and we, i.e. every single of the 82 million citizens of Germany, are to be issued an individual tax number which will stay with us all our live and even 20 years afterwards! That will be the first task of the BZSt. They estimate is that it'll take three to four yours until the last one has got his tax number. It is a huge task as for the first time all tax records will be accessible in electronic form and the local tax offices will be able to access them in a database. Seeing how many IT problems I encounter daily at my computer at work I am rather skeptical if this will really work. The new tas identification number will consist of 10 digits plus one, encoding things like name, former names, title, address, gender, day and place of birth and the local tax office. I wonder, why they would need to know about the local tax office. Probably to find your oldes tax declaration...

This system will of course make it easier for tax so offices to track down defrauders. As a law abiding citizen I wouldn't mind that so much, although if our tax regulations were less complicated getting around them would be a lot more difficult. (Someone told me only last week that about three quarters of all the existing tax regulations in the world were German.) But I do wonder if keeping data like that in a central database wouldn't make other institutions want to access them before long. And I am a bit worried about the protection of personal data.

The last example is the German toll system for trucks. Trucks carry little electronic black boxes in the drivers' units called OBUs (On Board Units) that send out signals. These are received at certain stations located on the motorways and the truck owners will get an invoice for the kilometers that have been driven by their trucks. The side effect of this is that it is possible to keep track of the movements of a certain truck and its driver. This has already been used in some criminal investigation. Rumours have it that plans are underfoot to install OBUs in every private car as well. Apart from getting a bit more money out of the car owners it will also accumulate vast amounts of data about individual persons. Who is going to guarantee all this information will be kept strictly confidental and will only be used by the proper authorities?

All this rather reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. And I think it will be one of the true challenges of our future life: with all this computer power and performace that is available nowadays it is easy to collect all sorts and vast amounts of data and information of all sorts. But what are we going to do with it? Will be not be buried by it? And will we be able to still protect the rights of privacy of individuals? It will be interesting to watch, I am sure.

Posted by Mausi at June 2, 2007 02:06 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt3.mu.nu/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5044

Comments

Posted by: The Gray Monk at June 2, 2007 10:59 PM

Posted by: Mausi at June 3, 2007 09:32 AM