Nearly 7 Percent of Tech Workers Admit to Cheating on Taxes

The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the average annual ‘tax gap’—the difference between taxes owed to the federal government and what is actually paid—has reached $458 billion. It’s tax day in America, and this year, almost 7 percent of techies admit to adding to that gap.

According to a new survey from Blind, an anonymous social network for working professionals, 6.6 percent, or 538 out of 8,113 tech workers, said they have improperly used tax shelters or intentionally misreported their earnings or expenses when filing their taxes.

“Blind is used primarily by software developers, product managers, and other highly compensated employees,” the company said in a statement to Nextgov. “Although we can't be sure of the cause, previous studies have shown that wealthier Americans are more likely to misreport in their favor on their taxes.”

According to the survey, the highest percentage of employees who admitted to intentionally cheating on their taxes—7.64 percent—came from Apple. Uber and LinkedIn also rounded out the top three.

Between 5 percent and 6 percent of employees from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft answered “true,” disclosing that they cheated when filing their income taxes.

Facebook, Oracle and Intel employed the lowest percentage of tech workers who confessed to intentionally misreporting their earnings or evading taxes. Only 3 out of 127 Intel employees surveyed said that they had done so.