Interesting discussion; that said, there's a non-trivial amount at least regarding one's financial picture that can be gotten simply from looking at a credit report. This is especially true if you have records over time on a single individual, and Amex certainly does if they so desire with their regular soft-pulls. For that matter, since lenders see the individual charges made on accounts, they may not get the shoe size necessarily (though they certainly know I have big feet based on the socks I've purchased) but they absolutely know what brands and styles I prefer. If you really want to get blackhat about it, using credit cards period is simply leaving a trail like a slug through society, what, when, where, and potentially with whom if correlating financial information is looked at more broadly. There are few people these days who can live off the grid so to speak, I certainly couldn't.
I will say this though having worked in a number of lenders: there are very stringent controls as to who sees what and when, and what the document retention policy is. I've also worked for a government contractor; while I'm a little skeptical personally of trusting the FBI over Amex, I can pretty much guaruntee you that the requirements McArthur has cannot be met by any lender. Top secret clearance, what a pain for not much point in their cases.
That said, I was looking at the scenario from my own perspective, where it's just me with limited assets (which incidently the value of I had to roughly disclose on the Amex application anyway) and nothing wierd or even interesting as far as taxes go as a result. If I do ever have more than that in my life and therefore on my tax transcripts, I may have to re-evaluate things; however, I'm pretty certain if I'm still running a non-trivial portion of my life through an Amex, they already know those things anyway with the exception of some particulars with regards to asset distribution and income sources.
There is also the little detail that a clearance is not issued without a specifc organizationl need that has to, itself, have authorization and need for handling classified stuff.
I don't think Amex's FR group qualifies.
@Anonymous wrote:I think it (top secret) was hyperbole rather than his real minimum requirement.
Just going over my tax return, leading to a question for McArthur or anyone who knows.
Being a good person (or rather being too scared not to, $10K fine for not filing, then a fine of the greater of $100K and 50% of assets for failure to identify an account), I have identified my offshore banking assets to the Treasury Department on TD F 90 22.1. Since this isn't filed with the tax return, does this show on the transcript returned from a 4506 T? If not, then a lot of assets might not be apparent in the FR, but I guess you could chose to tell them.
Assets, overseas or otherwise, do not show up on IRS transcripts nor on the full tax returns, Like the guy that died in Vegas with 7M in gold in cardboard boxes, that isn't on his transcripts unless he sold some and declared gap gains. And then only the amount sold would be reported.
