IRS website to identity thieves: "Come on in!"
A recent Government Accountability Office report decries poor security at the IRS website. Millions of users have been exposed to potential identity theft, and illegal police snooping.
The report was released three days after the deadline for filing personal income-tax returns, and at a time when concerns about identity theft and computer security are running high.
"This lack of systems security at the IRS is completely unacceptable and needs to be corrected immediately," said House of Representatives Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican.
The IRS promised to fix any problems and find out if tax returns had been exposed to outsiders.
The IRS over the past several years has taken steps to protect the information it collects, the report found. The agency has fixed 32 of the 53 problems that turned up in a 2002 review, the GAO said.
But the GAO found 39 new security problems on top of the 21 that remain unfixed.
Yes that's right, they are actually worse off than they were three years ago.
Among the risks:
"Increased risk exists that unauthorized users could ... claim a user identity and then use that identity to gain access to sensitive taxpayer or Bank Secrecy Act data," the report said.
Identity thieves have used stolen passwords to gain access to nearly half a million profiles of U.S. citizens maintained by data brokers ChoicePoint Inc. and LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier .
Kinder, Gentler IRS apparently also weak-ass and pwned.
