It’s no secret that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been under fire lately.
The news recently broke that a Treasury Inspector General report found significant deficiencies in the way that the agency safeguarded and accounted for millions of individual and business tax records containing sensitive information.
This puts taxpayers at risk of tax refund identity theft, as well as other financial issues.
Even worse, the watchdog also discovered eight thousand microfilm cartridges with personal taxpayer and tax information were unaccounted for after being transferred from California to an IRS processing center in Kansas City in 2021.
This new information comes on top of last year’s outcry over how the IRS destroyed data belonging to approximately 30 million filers during the height of the pandemic in March 2021.
It appears that there is an ongoing issue with proper handling of taxpayer information, which could significantly delay or even complicate taxpayers’ refunds – not to mention put their sensitive financial information at risk.
To make matters worse, required annual inventories were not conducted on three tax processing centers located in Austin, Kansas City and Ogden – further exacerbating this serious situation.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.
Last month brought yet another scandal regarding America’s largest tax preparation companies sharing tens of millions of taxpayers’ sensitive financial data with tech giants Google and Meta without their consent.
The investigation revealed shocking facts such as addresses, phone numbers, filing status, income amounts along with dependent names being shared by H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer through visitor tracking technology embedded in websites – potentially violating federal law.
Additionally it was discovered that customer activities on sites were tracked when completing forms; this could reveal if they are using any government programs or claimed certain tax breaks among other things – leaving them exposed to potential identity frauds risks and misuse.
Both the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and major tax preparation companies have failed drastically when it comes to properly protecting taxpayers’ personal information.
