Do you know where your tax records are? It’s a serious question in the case of millions of Americans whose records the IRS carelessly misplaced. That’s the big reveal in a recent inspector general’s report telling us that the federal mugging agency continues to be mindbogglingly incompetent at safeguarding the sensitive financial information it forcibly extracts from us all.
“The IRS was unable to locate any of the FY 2010 microfilm cartridges that should have been sent from the Fresno Tax Processing Center to the Kansas City Tax Processing Center,” the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed in an August 8 report on the tax agency’s data-handling practices. “As a result of the lack of adequate inventory controls, the IRS cannot account for thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive business and individual tax account records.”
That’s bad—remarkably bad given the bait the information in those records represents for criminals inclined “to commit tax refund fraud identity theft,” as the report goes on to warn. You could omit the “tax refund” part since the details we’re required to submit to the IRS could enable scammers to rob us blind in a host of ways that don’t matter to the government but are extremely serious to anybody on the receiving end.
As you might expect of a government agency, the incompetence doesn’t stop there.
Hellbound and Down 