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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

IRS dumps up to 100,000 Social Security numbers on the Internet

IRS dumps up to 100,000 Social Security numbers on the Internet

By John Haywardon Tue, 9 Jul 2013

We’re in the very best of hands, aren’t we?  Just wait until the people who slipped up and posted up to 100,000 Social Security numbers onto a website are in charge of your health care information.

Our good friends at the Tax Exempt Organizations unit are once again under fire, as a watchdog group called Public.Resource.orginvestigates a data management snafu and discovers the IRS has been inadvertently dropping files that contain Social Security numbers onto a public website.  National Journal explains:

Every so often, 527s [non-profit political groups] have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.organd other public-interest groups, and it’s a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group’s founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency’s January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government’s website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

Just the day before, Malamud had filed another letter to the agency describing a problem with the 990-Ts. Of over 3,000 tax returns contained in the January update, 319 contained sensitive data the agency should have scrubbed, Malamud wrote in the July 1 report that he filed to the inspector general’s office. In that mixup, some 2,319 social security numbers – perhaps more – were revealed.


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