IRS 'mistakenly' posts names, contact numbers and financial information from 120,000 taxpayers' retirement accounts on its website thanks to human coding error

UK Daily Mail ^ | 09/02/2022 | Ronny Reyes

[tenger]

The Federal government contracts the lowest bidder for IT support. This is nothing.

I don't think that's the case since I write some of those proposals. Where did you hear that about the lowest bidder?

Every agency is different and have their own sets of evaluation criteria. To post a broad statement about the Federal government like that is just not correct. In many cases, they'll award a contract to the contractor that provides the "best value" to the Agency. Yes, all the contractors must be competitive in price, but they also need to do the work contracted.

[Parley Baer]

“Hint: You know what we can do to you. And claim an oopsy.”

The next screw up will be those who have supported President Trump. Oh, we are so sorry for the mix-up.

[SES1066]

Human error and we have corrected it. We can assure you that this SAME error will not happen again. ... Until next time!

Why do you worry anyhow? The IRS manages the Internal Revenue Code and associated revenue collection at a historical accuracy of the high 90s by percentage!

Note though that Title 26 of the US Code (Congress passed taxation laws) is under 3,000 pages which makes it ~1.5 million words. Then there is the IRS written regulations that interpret what Congress has written into the IRS forms. Add to that the various Tax Court rulings and guidance letters in the years since 1916. By various estimates as they move these goalposts FREQUENTLY, the number of words in the effective tax code is somewhere close to 5 million of dense legalese.

Thus at 5 million words, a 1% misinterpretation would be 50k words in a scattergun spread that makes standing in quicksand look comforting! And the interpretation of the proper understanding of any error in this word salad is the IRS, the Tax Courts and, ultimately, the Federal Appeals process to the Supreme Court.

Thinking the alternatives like a complete replacement by something like the FAIRTax or some other visionary national sales tax to replace the IRS process? Do that and you still need revenue agents to insure that the sales tax is properly computed and sent in BUT the database of citizen information like this would not exist to be ‘accidentally’ exposed. I say visionary because government functionaries LIKE having the tax code to use like an axe. Just ask President Trump!

[Mark]

Just keep Demoncrats in office.

[rlmorel]

This makes me angry in ways I simply cannot express with the written word.

I work in healthcare. If I made this kind of mistake, I would be fired, the hospital would be fined millions of dollars, our name would become mud in the media. All under the aegis of government law with accompanying penalties imposed on healthcare, and mercilessly administered.

And it isn’t that I think that high bar is bad. It makes those of us involved consider deeply the actions we take in our profession.

But the government?

Government agencies and employees can lose track of millions of people’s records that contain not just a name, address, medical record number and date of service, but vital things like tax information, social security numbers, account numbers, legal information, you name it, and nobody is punished or even reprimanded.

That double standard makes me angry in ways I cannot civilly express.

[VTenigma]

An obvious mistake because of under staffing. These poor people are so over worked and punch drunk they pushed the wrong button. Get some more help in here stat!

[Sebator]

Human yeah right. It was malicious cat

[Thank You Rush]

“”On Friday, the Treasury assured Congress that Social Security numbers, full income information and other key pieces of financial data were not published and that those affected would be contacted in the coming weeks.””

Data was not published but those affected would be contacted??????? FOR WHAT REASON?

No wonder they need 87,000 new bodies at the IRS....

[FlingWingFlyer]

Probably spending too much time at the pistol range.

[Libloather]

The IRS needs to learn how to code.

[ApplegateRanch]

This is what happens when the IRS is 87,000 understaffed; hank goodness Biden & the Dems Congress got that fixed!

😵‍💫🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃😵‍💫

[aimhigh]

The real question is: Was this done on purpose to give the specified info to certain people?

[SunkenCiv]

This is what the leftists meant by "learn to code".

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[GOPJ]

Were all the ‘outed’ folks conservative Americans?

Asking for a friend.

[SunkenCiv]

Clearly it is an act of police state terrorism.

[Vaduz]

Wonder if the 120,000 taxpayers retirement accounts have an R in their voting history?.

[FreedomPoster]

If by “best value” you mean “the most kickbacks to Dem pols” then we agree.