IRS – Helping You Put Your Data at Risk
Everyone fears the Internal Revenue Service! But now it’s for a new reason. It seems using two applications they provide exposes taxpayers’ data to security breaches. The IRS deployed two critical computer systems although they new of their weak security and the risks they embedded.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) office, explains DarkReading, has recently issued a statement saying the IRS’s mainframe-based Customer Account Data Engine (CADE) for managing taxpayer accounts and its Account Management Services (AMS) for IRS access to taxpayer data contained security flaws that the IRS identified but did not fix before deploying them last year.
The billion-dollar, high-sensitivity CADE system is one of the key elements of the IRS’s computer modernization program, and processed about 20 percent of the 142 billion tax returns filed to the IRS.
AMS, meanwhile, includes taxpayer identification numbers in its application error log, and its operating system has only a 77.8 percent compliance rate with the required security settings, according to the report.
TGTA has no proof on any data being compromised or being accessed by any wrong doers, yet the risk has been quite real.
