IRS says thieves stole tax info from additional 220,000

[Lutherf]

News from The Associated Press

A computer breach at the IRS in which thieves stole tax information from thousands of taxpayers is much bigger than the agency originally disclosed.


An additional 220,000 potential victims had information stolen from an IRS website as part of a sophisticated scheme to use stolen identities to claim fraudulent tax refunds, the IRS said Monday. The revelation more than doubles the total number of potential victims, to 334,000.

As an aside to this, two years ago the IRS shut down a service which allowed certain professionals (CPA's, EA's, Attorney's, etc.) to access taxpayer data online. Though nobody said so officially at the time it was rather obvious that they were concerned about unscrupulous professionals accessing data without taxpayer consent. To "resolve" that problem they went to this new system which allowed the taxpayer to access their own information while excluding professionals from doing so in any semblance of a convenient manner. This, apparently, is the result of the "improvement".

Before this "improvement" they could have at least traced who accessed a taxpayer's account to the professional's account from which the data was accessed but even that protection is gone now.

When all this first started coming down I asked one of the Agents with whom I was working what made them think that restricting my online access in favor of a faxed in authorization was more secure since, if I happened to be unscrupulous, I could just forge the taxpayer's signature on the form I faxed. He just chuckled and said he wasn't allowed to comment.

 

[joG]

News from The Associated Press

As an aside to this, two years ago the IRS shut down a service which allowed certain professionals (CPA's, EA's, Attorney's, etc.) to access taxpayer data online. Though nobody said so officially at the time it was rather obvious that they were concerned about unscrupulous professionals accessing data without taxpayer consent. To "resolve" that problem they went to this new system which allowed the taxpayer to access their own information while excluding professionals from doing so in any semblance of a convenient manner. This, apparently, is the result of the "improvement".

Before this "improvement" they could have at least traced who accessed a taxpayer's account to the professional's account from which the data was accessed but even that protection is gone now.

When all this first started coming down I asked one of the Agents with whom I was working what made them think that restricting my online access in favor of a faxed in authorization was more secure since, if I happened to be unscrupulous, I could just forge the taxpayer's signature on the form I faxed. He just chuckled and said he wasn't allowed to comment.

It is important that people lose their jobs.

 

[jmotivator]

It is important that people lose their jobs.

They will lose their jobs... in favor of promotion.

 

[NonoBadDog]

It is important that people lose their jobs.

Won't happen. OPM didn't worry about it till it got to 22 million people. The only thing that happened there is the head of OPM resigned.

 

[Roadvirus]

All that money and energy the IRS used harassing Conservative groups could've gone to improving their security measures.