IRS Accidentally Releases 112,000 Taxpayers' Private Data Again (bloombergtax.com) 45
Confidential data of about 112,000 taxpayers inadvertently published by the IRS over the summer was mistakenly republished in late November and remained online until early December, the IRS disclosed last week. From a report: Form 990-T data that was supposed to stay private had been taken offline but made its way back to the IRS site when a contractor uploaded an old file that still included most of the private information, a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders said. The agency is required to make Form 990-Ts filed by nonprofit groups available online but is supposed to keep the form filed by individuals private; in both cases, the agency made that information available too.
An internal programming error caused the September release of private forms along with the ones filed by nonprofit groups, the letter said. This time, the contractor tasked with managing the database reuploaded the older file with the original data instead of a new file that filtered out the forms that needed to be kept private. The IRS shared corrected data with the contractor on Nov. 23, but the old files had not been purged from their system. A third-party researcher alerted the IRS the files were back online on Dec. 1, and the IRS ordered the contractor to take them down immediately. Roughly 104,000 of the 106,000 forms disclosed in September were redisclosed this time. The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, the report added, citing a person familiar with the matter.
An internal programming error caused the September release of private forms along with the ones filed by nonprofit groups, the letter said. This time, the contractor tasked with managing the database reuploaded the older file with the original data instead of a new file that filtered out the forms that needed to be kept private. The IRS shared corrected data with the contractor on Nov. 23, but the old files had not been purged from their system. A third-party researcher alerted the IRS the files were back online on Dec. 1, and the IRS ordered the contractor to take them down immediately. Roughly 104,000 of the 106,000 forms disclosed in September were redisclosed this time. The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, the report added, citing a person familiar with the matter.
An Act of Congress (Score:5, Interesting)
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Terrible idea. If my family knew how much I really make, they would nonstop be pestering me to "borrow" some.
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Looks like someone has trouble saying "no"...
Looks like someone doesn't have family who thinks they're owed things that other family members have. You can say no all you want, but some people just keep asking and asking until you either give in or estrange yourself from that member, or the entire family.
Re: An Act of Congress (Score:2)
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Fix the tax code so they don't have the data (Score:1, Insightful)
If the US went to a consumption tax the IRS would not have or need personal income data. People would pay their taxes at the checkout counter.
Tax information would be solely from businesses that collect the tax.
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Which of those do you think would keep the IRS from repeating a known mistake through sheer incompetence?
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2. Simplify the tax code so a good accountant can't get a billionaire out of paying taxes.
This is a common misconception: billionaires are not getting out of paying taxes because they got lucky and found a "smart" accountant; they get out of paying taxes because they essentially wrote the tax law. That's like saying I'm smart that I found beer in my 'fridge, ignoring the fact that I'm the one who put it there.
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Significant portions of taxable income would be lost overseas, lots of people work in North America and send a majority of their earnings overseas for various reasons.
To support family, to a tax haven, tons of reasons. You'd just massively increase the funneling of wealth outside of the country, maybe that sounds fantastic to some people who intend to do that but it's a shit deal for anyone who works and actually commits to where they live.
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Significant portions of taxable income would be lost overseas, lots of people work in North America and send a majority of their earnings overseas for various reasons.
More than tourists coming to the USA and buying things?
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We have that anyway.
You can't get rid of income tax and soley rely on purchase taxes. You'd need to increase the cost of product to make up for it. It would drastically increase poverty for the less fortunate as the cost of good steeply rises, and people making a ton of money are only buying so much in the first place, so revenue would decrease, the rich would increase their gains significantly, E.G their taxes are like 45%, their not going to purchase enough to make up for 45% of their mutli-hundreds or mi
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I've never suggested to get rid of income tax, nor that it was a good idea. I too believe it's a terribly bad idea.
But I am suggesting that mentioning only the loss from money sent overseas, is a very one-sided argument that over simplifies a complex problem. The most obvious counter-point is that it will also tax money coming *from* overseas.
(not counting the fact that the people sending money overseas are usually either people in the lower brackets on the income tax, or people using tax havens with the pu
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No I think a lot of people send money over seas and not just in the lower tax bracket. Like if I could work internationally for my own personal benefits my money from western countries would go much further in places where common people are less fortunate.
I know of a lot of people not in the lower tax brackets who choose to live abroad as it provides a better living for them than spending the money in a western country.
I also believe it would negatively impact the spending of tourists over here. If 10 touri
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I never said all people sending money overseas are either poor or rich. I said _usually_ they are.
Your experience is just an anecdote, that does not make it a statistic. It's especially meaningless since going by your typo, you don't live in the US.
If 10 tourist by an item worth 2$ that's 20$.
If 3 tourists buy an item word 4$ that's only 12.$
Anybody can make up an example that favors their viewpoint.
Not that that example is even remotely realistic to begin with. To double the price, it means adding 100% in tax at the very least. It only gets worse if one assumes that the $2 already accounts for some
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I responded to you with a made up example, matching yours.
More than tourists coming to the USA and buying things?
Where's your data on that? You have none, so it was conjecture.
Don't try to be clever and be like, "But I was asking a question" No one falls for that. That's like, "If you elected X political leader, they wouldn't murder and kill everyone?" There implications in the way your question was worded without a doubt.
So don't respond all high and mighty that my narrow view was misguided, your narrow view that tourists would make up for it was misguided.
Gre
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That was tried, at least in the court of public opinion. Not enough people supported the Fair Tax. It's probably never going to happen.
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Not enough people supported the Fair Tax.
Probably because it is anything but a fair tax - as you would guess from the name. Kind of like the "Inflation Reduction Act".
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It was interesting. I honestly didn't expect them to include the "prebate". But any transition away from an income tax to a consumption tax was going to sting people who live their lives perpetually in debt. When your society is based around spending more than you earn, a consumption tax is not going to be popular. Plus many people are still happy to get tax rebates without really thinking about (or caring about) what a tax rebate really means for them.
Accountants despised the idea as well.
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People would pay their taxes at the checkout counter.
... and the billionaires would pay even less tax. Because of this, taxes for most people on /. would increase. Is that what you really want?
Re:Fix the tax code so they don't have the data (Score:4, Informative)
If the US went to a consumption tax the IRS would not have or need personal income data. People would pay their taxes at the checkout counter.
Tax information would be solely from businesses that collect the tax.
Consumption taxes are highly regressive. The poorer you are the higher portion of your income you need to spend on consumption while wealthier people can invest their excess income.
So even if you have a consumption tax you still need to couple it with some kind of progressive income tax just to make things somewhat fair. Meaning you still need personal income data on everyone.
Maybe if you couple a consumption tax with a UBI things start to balance out.
Accenture, no wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
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I really wish I could mod you up.
I had some accenture guys show up off and on for a solid year. They were contracted to take over server maintenance.
They caused a ton of work by asking for the same information over and over again; and then were never available for ACTUAL server patching. Have something that needed a little love tap or even just logging into vmware to reboot a machine? Yeah...maybe see them 7-10 days later...
I did not shed any tears when they stopped coming around and I heard they'd lost
The new 80,000 IRS agents will help. (Score:1)
Blaming Accenture? (Score:3)
Ultimately this fuck up will result in no progress, no action, no one held meaningfully accountable, and nothing being done to prevent it going forwards. This is the story that plays out time and time again, everyone cares DEEPLY about data privacy and data protection, until it means doing something productive, and then everyone has a hands-off approach.
How to prevent this kind of accident is difficult, but I'd suggest moving to a personal encryption standard, where people own encryption keys, both public and private, and the government has to ask for access, that must be granted for short periods (minutes), instead of having access by default. If we moved data ownership into the hands of the people, we'd start protecting person data, but we all know that will never happen, because it's productive, and productive is a four-letter word to any government.
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but I'd suggest moving to a personal encryption standard, where people own encryption keys
Do you really believe Joe Average wouldn't lose them in a matter of weeks, if not days ?
If we moved data ownership into the hands of the people
we'd lose a shitton of important data critical to the workings of a functionning society, just like people lose all the time all that is on their computer's hard drive and phones.
What part of "People are nice, but they're fucking morons" don't you understand ?
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I understand the monstrous complexity of what I'm proposing,
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we'd lose a shitton of important data critical to the workings of a functionning society
Then your 'functioning society' which needs to pry into the personal details of its citizens is dysfunctional.
Accenture?! again!? (Score:2)
Accenture? why not blame them, Accenture will just CHANGE THEIR NAME AGAIN to hide from everybody in plain sight again. Arthur Anderson fucked up so bad they changed their name to Accenture. Will this be bad enough? Maybe they should go into business being a fall guy corporation for others?
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I don't understand ... (Score:2)
Form 990-Ts filed by nonprofit groups available online but is supposed to keep the form filed by individuals private
Form 990-T is to be filled out by tax exempt organizations for income not related to their tax exempt status. What is a tax exempt individual?
And how do I become one?
Two important details.. (Score:2)
An internal programming error caused the September release of private forms along with the ones filed by nonprofit groups, the letter said. This time, the contractor tasked with managing the database reuploaded the older file with the original data instead of a new file that filtered out the forms that needed to be kept private.
Was this data outside of IRS control at any time?
The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, according to a person familiar.
They'll reconsider it but then considering how many billions of dollars go to Accenture from gov't coffers, and how many decision-makers want to be hired into senior positions after their public service life is over, they'll drop the issue.
Amazingly ancient view.. (Score:2)
No Accident (Score:2)
In unrelated news (Score:2)
In unrelated news:
In Dublin, Accenture plc is to change it's name to FutureTechConsulting (FTC) plc. CEO Julie Sweet said that the rebrand was intended to clarify and highlight their core business purpose, and looked forward to forging new partnerships and to guiding the organisation into a profitable future where technology serves all mankind.
In Washington, the IRS announces a new partnership with FTC plc. Commissioner Douglas O'Donnell says he expects great things of the company, and looks forward to a lo