April 5, 2007

Inspector General: IRS Put Thousands of Taxpayers at Risk for ID Theft

Thousands of taxpayers could be at risk of identity theft or other financial fraud because the Internal Revenue Service has failed to adequately protect information on its 52,000 laptop computers and other storage systems, a new government report concludes. The IRS did not begin to adequately correct the security problems until the second half of 2006, despite being warned about them in 2003 and again in February 2006, according to a report by the inspector general of the IRS, J. Russell George.

IRS Found Lax in Protecting Taxpayer Data, Washington Post, April 5, 2007.