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Reporting portal for tax fraud: How anonymous do whistleblowers remain?

2021-09-03T11:46:47.158Z


The Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Finance is soliciting tipsters to find tax evaders. But if you really want to remain anonymous, you have to be careful.


Enlarge image

With the new portal every internet user can report tax fraud

Photo: Bernd Weißbrod / picture alliance / dpa

For some it is a first-class political issue, for others it is a completely normal administrative tool: the anonymous reporting portal of the Baden-Württemberg financial administration is polarizing in the heated election campaign.

But how does the new portal actually work?

Do whistleblowers really go undetected?

The most important questions and answers:

Are anonymous tips legal?

Anonymous reports to the tax office are not a new phenomenon.

The tax authorities of other federal states also maintain information portals.

Although tipsters are usually encouraged to provide names and contact details, advertisements are also accepted without a sender - be it via an anonymous letter, a specially created e-mail account or via a web form with missing or even incorrect sender information.

The novelty of the Baden-Württemberg portal: anonymity is the default setting here.

While other tax authorities explicitly point out to tipsters that advertisements by name have a higher weight, with the new reporting platform you first have to activate the sender field with an additional click.

A spokesman for the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Finance told SPIEGEL that more than 1,600 anonymous reports had been received by the state's tax offices in 2020 alone.

But important details were often missing, so that the authorities wanted to create a communication channel to be able to ask questions.

How does the portal work?

In principle, it is a contact portal, as you know it from many websites: You fill in the text fields, you can also upload documents and send the whole thing off.

The information sent is checked centrally and, if it is deemed helpful, forwarded to the relevant tax offices.

The highlight of the new platform: An e-mail inbox is created for every anonymous tip.

Anyone who has submitted a report can then stay in contact with the investigators via this mailbox.

In order to access the mailbox, you have to log in under the item "Tracking" with the reference ID and a password.

Here tipsters can see whether the tax investigators are still missing important information.

However, they should not receive precise information on the status of the proceedings.

If you want, you can do without anonymity in the portal and leave your own contact details.

These can be used by the tax office for inquiries.

How anonymous is the portal?

Such tipster portals are widespread, not least because of the success of Wikileaks.

SPIEGEL also maintains such an informant portal with an anonymous mailbox.

Such informant portals, however, usually rely on additional encryption such as the Tor browser, which obscures the IP address.

The Baden-Württemberg portal is based on the whistleblower portal of the Dortmund-based provider Otris, which is used in particular for in-house whistleblower portals with which employees can report violations within a group.

At the request of SPIEGEL, the Ministry of Finance stated that the system was configured in such a way that data such as IP addresses are neither stored nor forwarded to tax offices.

These access data could reveal whether a company computer was used for the display.

By dispensing with this form of traceability, the Baden-Württemberg tax authorities are seeking the trust of tipsters.

Can senders still be traced?

Even if someone sends a tip without giving a name, that does not mean that this communication cannot be traced. For example, the US whistleblower Reality Winner was caught because the US magazine "The Intercept" had published the documents she had sent in full screen. What she didn't know was that the printouts contained a barely visible code that allowed US law enforcement officers to trace the document back to a specific printer. As a result, Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison.

Documents transmitted in purely digital form can also contain such information: Office programs leave traces of the computer on which a file was opened in the so-called metadata. Digital cameras store identifiers up to unique serial numbers in every image file. If you take a picture of a tax file at home with your mobile phone, you can sometimes leave the exact GPS coordinates of your home in the photo. Sometimes documents can be traced back to a computer via obscure technical information such as the existing fonts.

The Baden-Württemberg portal only advises tipsters that the files sent should not contain any personal data if you want to remain anonymous. At the request of SPIEGEL, Kosmas Zittel, managing director of the German whistleblower network, criticized the inadequate education of the tipsters. "This includes, for example, that whistleblowers should not use the employer's PC for submitting reports and further communication and recommending using the Tor browser," says Zittel.

At the same time, whistleblowers should be aware that they could be exposed because documents were only accessible to a small group of people.

In general, Zittel warns that such a portal cannot replace a strong tax investigation.

"Where the state does not fulfill this task and control mechanisms fail, society depends on external whistleblowing," explains the civil rights activist.

What happens if the ads are wrong?

Anyone who knowingly accuses or suspects others is liable to prosecution. "Such investigations into anonymous complainants can only take place in exceptional cases, as anonymity has to be protected," explains the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Finance at the request of SPIEGEL. However, such investigations cannot be ruled out if sufficient information is found. The priority is to protect the data subjects against whom false accusations are made.

However, the accused will only find out that information has been submitted about them when the tax investigators initiate criminal proceedings or the tax office wants to collect more taxes on the basis of the information available. If the information is not followed up, those affected should not find out about an anonymous report. In principle, suspects could also request that incorrect data be corrected when they learn of an advertisement via the portal. The accused's rights to information have long been controversial between data protection officials and tax authorities.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-09-03

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