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.

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