If you’ve been scouring your website logs for a bot named “Xenon” since reading our last post, you can stop now. While Google’s spider is easy to recognize by the familiar moniker “Googlebot,” the TaxMan won’t be so easy to spot.

The bot names, or ‘user agents’ for the web savvy, of the spiders used by the tax cartel have not been released. Nor will they. Marten den Uyl of data mining firm Sentient Machine Research says the user agent (bot name) is likely to be variable or configurable on the tax investigator’s part.

For the web savvy, that means you cannot add a modifier to your robots.txt file to keep the tax man out.

Generally, it’s easy to distinguish bot traffic in your server logs by the sheer speed at which a spider (bot) can traverse web pages. When it comes to keepign the TaxMan out, think again, and think covert.

Where a typical search engine bot can hit thousands of pages in a second, Xenon uses a slow search paradigm that mimics human surfing. The TaxMan’s spider could take minutes, hours or even days to digest your website.

The slow search prevents Xenon’s bot from creating excess traffic or drawing attention to itself in the website’s server logs.

Xenon’s spider can even be configured to target specific niches… industries that traditionally have a high incidence of non-filing. While you may not know which industries have a high rate of tax evasion, rest assured that the TaxMan does.

Once the web pages are crawled and documented, Xenon’s Identity Information Extraction Module will interface with national databases that contain information such as names, city names and streets. It will then cross refer all the information it’s gathered with national tax records.

“Of course it’s not illegal,” Par Strom, a noted privacy advocate in the world of Swedish IT, says. “I don’t feel quite comfortable having a tax office sending out those kind of spiders.”

If you’re a little nervous about the idea of TaxMan spidering your website, let us help you clean up your tax records now. Browse our website to learn how the DioGuardi AmnestyRX™ lawyer-negotiated settlement can protect you from criminal prosecution for tax evasion and protect your personal financial records from the TaxMan. Or call us directly at 1-877-TAXRX-02.