More than 100,000 households’ tax data stolen through IRS website

by Josephine Djuhana | May 28, 2015 8:10 am

irs[1]The Internal Revenue Service announced Tuesday that identity thieves “used taxpayer-specific data acquired from non-IRS sources to gain unauthorized access to information on approximately 100,000 tax accounts through IRS’ ‘Get Transcript’ application.”

Data acquired illegally, such as Social Security information, date of birth or street address, could be used to clear the IRS’ “multi-step authentication process,” rendering most of those safety precautions useless. With this data, the IRS said, criminals were able to file fraudulent tax refunds.

According to the statement:

“The matter is under review by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration as well as the IRS’ Criminal Investigation unit, and the ‘Get Transcript’ application has been shut down temporarily.

In addition to disabling the “Get Transcript” application, the IRS has taken the below steps:

Endnotes:
  1. [Image]: http://calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/irs.jpg

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