NEWS / IRS loses millions of sensitive records-watchdog report

The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has lost track of millions of highly sensitive personal and business tax records. The records were supposed to have been transferred from a now-defunct facility in California but vanished in the process. The report, which was released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the government’s overseer of the IRS, also noted that thousands of other records stored at a facility in Utah had also gone missing.

Following the shutdown of an IRS processing center in Fresno, California, millions of tax records pertaining to the fiscal year of 2010 were supposed to be transferred to another processing center in in Kansas City, Missouri, but instead got lost. The report noted that the information contained in those records could be used by scammers to commit tax refund fraud identity theft.

The watchdog also reviewed IRS’s mandatory storage of old records in microfilm cartridges and discovered serious deficiencies in accounting for millions of tax records. For instance, instead of finding up to 168 microfilm cartridges holding up to 2,000 images of tax data each, TIGTA found 7 empty boxes at an IRS facility in Ogden, Utah, with IRS employees lacking the knowledge of the whereabouts of those records. TIGTA noted that one of the reasons the records had gone missing was possibly the fact that vendor the IRS had been using to manufacture the cartridges had gone out of business in 2018.

Furthermore, the watchdog accused the IRS of failing to adequately inventory the microfilm cartridges on an annual basis and of failing to restrict access to those records. For example, TIGTA discovered that the IRS was storing microfilm cartridges containing highly sensitive personal taxpayer data on open shelving in a large warehouse.

In response to the accusations in the report, IRS Wage and Investment Commissioner Kenneth C. Corbin was quoted by Politico as arguing that the agency was severely underfunded, which resulted in redirecting employees responsible for cartridge inventory to other higher priority duties.

A&M Logos International regularly interacts with the IRS to secure U. S. tax residency certification. We may also be able to assist you with other IRS matters, such as entity classification election forms and other mandatory forms. Call us today at (212) 233-7061 or e-mail us at info@apostille.us.