IRS Says It Exposed Some Confidential Taxpayer Data On Website

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: The Internal Revenue Service inadvertently posted what is normally confidential information involving about 120,000 individuals before discovering the error and removing the data from its website, officials said Friday. The data are from Form 990-T (PDF), which is often required for people with individual retirement accounts who earn certain types of business income within those retirement plans. That typically includes people whose IRAs are invested in master limited partnerships, real estate or other assets that generate income, not those whose IRAs are solely invested in securities.

The disclosures included names, contact information and financial information about income within those IRAs. It didn't include Social Security numbers, full individual income information or other data that could affect a taxpayer's credit, the Treasury Department determined, according to a letter that the administration is sending to key members of Congress on Friday. The IRS and Treasury Department blamed a human coding error that happened last year when Form 990-T began to be electronically filed. The nonpublic data was mistakenly included with the public data and all of it was available for searching and downloading on the agency's website. The Wall Street Journal, which routinely analyzes nonprofit tax filings, downloaded at least some of the data before its removal.

No biggie

[quonset]

They're just trying to catch up to private industry and the tens of millions of people's data they've released.

Re:No biggie [Nothing top secret there!]

[shanen]

At least we can be sure that printouts of "the taxpayers' confidential tax data" wasn't in the empty folders. The only top secret tax data is TFG's.

(Excuse me, but I'm still in a WTF condition. WHAT WAS IN THE FOLDERS before they become empty?)

But I can offer another crazy solution approach. Now I want to reform the Senate so that each Senator represents one percent of the federal tax revenue. If any corporate cancers want a Senator, they'll have to pay their taxes to get one (or more). And if I don't pay a

Re:

[quonset]

Probaby the funniest part is:

1) They're my documents!

Later . . .

2) They planted those documents and I want them back!

Still later . . .

3) Look how they threw my documents on the floor. They were all in boxes!

Re:

[shanen]

Okay, but I'm still going nuts over the empty files. I'm expecting the next excuse to be TFG was so stingy... "No, he just wanted to save taxpayer money by recycling the empty top-secret folders after they had been emptied and thrown away!"

But trying to return to the original story... With my suggestion each person who was affected by this data exposure would have a specific Senator to complain to. Now I'm imagining sorting the taxpayers by the amount of taxes paid. So for the Senators who represent the ind

Re:

[UnknownSoldier]

Incompetent
Regime
Servants /s

Unsurprising

[stabiesoft]

They are so understaffed it is insane. I've been trying for 3 weeks now to contact them about some trivial matter to no avail. How in the world in late summer can they be experiencing high call volumes? Tax season must be supremely high call volumes.

Re:

[Retired Chemist]

Not necessarily, I think most people just give up.

Re:

[thrasher thetic]

Considering the income tax was supposed to be a temporary measure, I'd be perfectly happy if they were utterly unstaffed. There is no violin tiny enough.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

In a previous post you say

"I live slightly less than an hour, call it 50 miles driving distance, from the nearest major city. There is no DSL, there is no cable, you can't even get a home-internet package through one of the major cell carriers since 5G isn't out here. Your options are traditional satellite or using your phone as a hotspot for LTE. Fortunately, being this far out also means that the major cable operators/telcos have no presence or monopoly power. Our electrical coop has gotten something aro

Re:

[antdude]

And why aren't they not hiring to fix this issue? They also still use old systems. :(

Re:

[stabiesoft]

Ask your congress critter. They set the funding level. And ditto on the old system. Really it is stupid. Any biz is going to fully fund accounts receivables, but not our dumb reps. But then underfunding means no audits for the big donors.

Armed agent asks if you have a problem with this?

[Babel-17]

Tells you not to be a c--t about it, and they just want to wet their beak.