Another Week, Another Leak at the IRS The newly supercharged agency shows again that it can’t protect confidential taxpayer data.
‘Speedy” isn’t the first word we associate with the Internal Revenue Service, but the agency hardly wasted a minute in showing why it shouldn’t be trusted with tens of billions of dollars in new funding. Once again it has managed to fail its most basic mandate: Keep taxpayer information private.
The IRS told the press Friday that it had inadvertently published confidential information on its website, with details from about 120,000 filers. “Disclosures included names, contact information and financial information,” the Journal reported.
The error affected taxpayers who filed 990-Ts, which individual retirement account holders use to report certain taxable business income. The data was apparently public for months until the mistake was spotted. The agency believes human error was the cause, with an internal coder accidentally posting private records alongside public corporate records.
Recent history suggests accountability will come slowly, if ever. More than a year after untold numbers of tax filings somehow made it into the hands of the progressive site ProPublica, the agency has told Congress nothing about what happened, making corrective action impossible.
Democrats recently handed the IRS $80 billion in new funding in full knowledge of these shortcomings. Not to fix them, mind you. The legislation spends $4.8 billion on modernization but nearly 10 times as much on its top priority: enforcement. If the agency wants to sell the public on its newfound effectiveness, it ought to focus on its own errors as much as on taxpayers’.
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