An anonymous reader shares The Hill’s report from the beginning of the month. Apparently, the US Internal Revenue Service, responsible for collecting taxes, “cannot locate thousands of cartridges of microfilm containing millions of sensitive personal and business tax records, according to a surveillance report.”
The Inspector General of the Treasury in charge of tax administration declared in a report released Aug. 8 that the IRS cannot account for cartridges of microfilm—which contain backups of tax records as required by federal law—from fiscal year 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 in total, at the tax processing center in Ogden, Utah. Ogden personnel did not know where the missing cartridges were.
More than 4,000 cartridges containing information on corporate tax accounts for fiscal year 2018 and 4,500 cartridges containing information on individual tax accounts for fiscal year 2019 could also not be accounted for in the facilities of Kansas City, according to the report.
“Personal taxpayer information and tax information included on these backup tapes is key information that can be used to commit tax refund fraudulent identity theft,” the report said.
