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As Italy's cash-strapped government launches its latest bid to crack down on tax evasion of up to $192 billion a year, it is getting a little help from mobilization on social networks. Blogs, Facebook groups and mobile apps are all being used to encourage Italians who have long turned a blind eye to rampant corruption to report shops, restaurants, doctors and dentists who are dodging taxes. Edoardo Sera, a 27-year-old IT consultant, along with some friends recently, launched the website tassa.li, which translates as "tax.them", to report the fraudsters. The website pulls together the individual reports into a "tax evasion map" and calls for people to boycott businesses that are not pulling their weight. The Facebook group "Friends of Receipts" and the website evasori.info have taken an even more aggressive approach, publishing names and addresses. Public anger against tax evaders is rising as the debt crisis demands ever deeper sacrifices by ordinary Italians, who have been forced to accept three austerity packages worth 80 billion euros in the past year alone. The challenge is a worthy but daunting one after years of laxity under the long-serving former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who famously said in 2004: "If I'm asked for 50 percent, I feel morally obliged to evade taxes." Tax authorities last year managed to claw back 11 billion euros but experts say this is only the tip of the iceberg in a country where doctors and dentists often offer their clients a discount if they do not ask for an official receipt. | 
