The IRS announced on Tuesday that criminals have used taxpayer-specific information to gain access to approximately 100,000 taxpayers’ accounts through the IRS’s Get Transcript online application and steal those taxpayers’ data. The Get Transcript app has been shut down temporarily.
The IRS says the criminals obtained enough taxpayer-specific information from outside sources that they were able to get through the Get Transcript authentication process. The IRS became aware of the problem late last week when it noticed unusual activity taking place in the application. The hacking apparently started in February and involved approximately 200,000 attempts to access the Get Transcript app. The Get Transcript app is not hosted on the IRS computer system that handles tax return filing submissions, and the IRS says that the filing submission system remains secure.
Both the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) and the IRS’s Criminal Investigation unit are investigating the matter. As for a motive, the IRS said in its announcement of the breach, “It’s possible that some of these transcript accesses were made with an eye toward using them for identity theft for next year’s tax season.”
The IRS says it will provide a free credit monitoring service for those taxpayers whose accounts were hacked. It is also notifying all 200,000 taxpayers whose accounts were the targets of the unauthorized access attempts. Those letters will start going out this week.
—Alistair M. Nevius ( anevius@aicpa.org ) is the JofA’s editor-in-chief, tax.
