Tax authorities in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Canada and the UK are spidering the web "with the assistance of Amsterdam-based data mining firm Sentient Machine Research," according to Wired, and Sweden is thinking of joining the group.
Wired talked to Dag Hardyson, the national project leader for e-commerce for Skatteverket, the Swedish tax authority. From the story:
Hardyson said the Swedish government -- which already has its own internally developed tax crawlers -- is currently keeping a copy of everything it spiders. That means that someone's long-expired actions have the potential to come back and haunt them. "We can scan and store all actions for every e-marketplace in Sweden, it's about 55,000 per day," said Hardyson. He said his agency hasn't decided if it will change its policies with the new, more sophisticated Xenon software. "Is this what we should do? Our lawyers must look at it."
