Security News > 2023 > February > Hacking the Tax Code

There are thousands of black-hat researchers who examine every line of the tax code looking for exploitable vulnerabilities-tax attorneys and tax accountants.

Lobbyists are constantly trying to insert this or that provision into the tax code that benefits their clients financially.

It's hacking the processes that create them: the legislative process that creates tax law.

We don't have the ability to patch tax code with anywhere near the same agility that we have to patch software.

The 2017 tax law capped income tax deductions for property taxes.

What happens when you feed a ML system the entire U.S. tax code and tell it to figure out all of the ways to minimize the amount of tax owed? Or, in the case of a multinational corporation, to feed it the entire planet's tax codes? What sort of vulnerabilities would it find? And how many? Dozens or millions?

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/hacking-the-tax-code.html