This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 9, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown. The IRS snooping on your cash app, Venmo and PayPal transactions has already begun.

There are numerous problems with allowing it, but it also indicates a cultural problem

inside federal agencies that, because the data exists, they should be able to access it.

Cato's Nick Anthony and Julian Sanchez spoke with me on Monday.

A lot of people engage in cash transactions and in the more recent digital age it has become relatively easier to engage

in those kinds of transactions with an app, Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, any number of other applications that allow you to move a few bucks here and there.

And now the IRS has the power under certain circumstances to gather information about those kinds of transactions.

If you total up $600 worth of them in a year and a lot of people do that.

So how do we understand, first of all, the power of the IRS to do this, what limits their authority to snoop on my

cash app and say, Caleb, we think you've done something suspicious here and we need to investigate it.

Well, the chief way that they're using to step into this space is through the third party doctrine.

And while it sounds pretty innocuous in passing,

it's something that has been around in just about every space

for the past 50 years or so used as basically breaking it down to you have a right to

privacy that's protected by the Constitution but the government can intervene if you've allowed a third party to get involved with your privacy.

So think of when you have a bank account, you give your money to the bank or you give your money to a

payment processor like Venmo. They suddenly become a third party in between you

and the person you want to share your money with and that alone gives them the authority to step in and

essentially violate what should be protected by the Fourth Amendment.

This is something new, of course, actually one of the seminal decisions in which that

third-party doctrine was articulated involved the the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 and

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