Thieves stole taxpayer data from IRS ‘Get Transcript’ service

The Washington Post: Shortly after the Internal Revenue Service launched its “Get Transcript” service in 2014, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen lauded it as “another innovation…a secure online system that allows taxpayers to view and print a record of their IRS account, also known as a transcript, in a matter of minutes.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just taxpayers who got their records through the service. Identity thieves did too.

More than 350,000 taxpayer accounts “were successfully accessed by unauthorized individuals” from January 1, 2014 and May 21, 2015, according to an audit report by the Treasury Inspector General (IG) for Tax Administration.

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