- Joined
- Sep 16, 2012
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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.
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.