America's IRS Can't Find Millions of Sensitive Tax Records: Watchdog

An anonymous reader shares The Hill's report from earlier this month. Apparently America's tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service "cannot locate thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive individual and business tax account records, according to a watchdog report."The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in a report released August 8 that the IRS cannot account for microfilm cartridges - which contain backups of tax records as required under federal law - from fiscal 2010 that were originally stored at a processing center in Fresno, California... The watchdog also found seven empty boxes, which could hold up to 168 cartridges total, at the Ogden Tax Processing Center in Utah. Ogden personnel did not know where the missing cartridges were. More than 4,000 cartridges containing business tax account information from fiscal 2018 and 4,500 cartridges containing individual tax account information from fiscal 2019 also could not be accounted for at the Kansas City facility, according to the report. "The personal taxpayer and tax information included on these backup cartridges is key information that can be used to commit tax refund fraud identity theft," the report noted.

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