Jeff May 11th, 2007
You would think the government wouldn’t be so ridiculously stupid when it comes to protecting our personal information. My favorite part about this article is the part where the author thinks that people wont voluntarily submit their taxes; I didn’t know we had a choice!
| IRS Found Lax in Protecting Taxpayer Data |
| 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. |
| 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 |
| If taxpayers don’t feel their personal information is protected, that could make them less likely to voluntarily file their taxes, |
| Nearly 500 IRS laptops were lost or stolen during that 3 1/2 -year period, many from the homes or cars of IRS workers but a significant number — 111 — from IRS offices, the report found |
| In one instance, “an employee wrote user account names and passwords to the computer and various systems to which the employee has access on a piece of paper that was taped to the laptop,” the report says |
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