(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – In an outrageous admission, the Internal Revenue Service is believed to have lost track of millions of tax account records, putting millions of Americans at risk, as highlighted in a special report by an internal oversight entity.
The report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that the IRS could not account for thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive records.
These backup cartridges, which held tax information from fiscal year 2010, were kept in a Fresno, California, center.
When this Fresno facility was shut down, these cartridges were meant to be transferred to a Kansas City, Missouri, processing center last February.
Additionally, the oversight body found seven unoccupied cartridge boxes in Ogden, Utah, potentially housing up to 168 cartridges.
The exact whereabouts of these cartridges from the Ogden Center remain unknown.
Moreover, the oversight team couldn’t trace more than 4,000 business tax record cartridges from FY 2018 and an additional 4,500 individual tax record cartridges from FY 2019. These records were believed to be stored in the Kansas City center.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report emphasized, “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.”
Furthermore, the investigation exposed a lapse at the Ogden facility in Utah, where the microfilm cartridges weren’t securely stored to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive tax information. The inquiry also revealed that the three mentioned tax processing facilities improperly stored information cartridges beyond their intended retention time.
As per US regulations, backup cartridges with individual tax information should be discarded 30 years post their filing date, while business tax data should be retained for a maximum of 75 years.
The oversight body concluded that the IRS staff hadn’t performed mandatory yearly checks on the microfilm cartridges and stressed the need for the tax agency to “better restrict access to the tax records.”
