Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—A new government report showing that the Internal Revenue Service has continuing serious problems keeping taxpayer information secure internally underscores the importance of the IRS abandoning its plans to freely turn such data over to the private sector, the head of the union representing IRS employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) called the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) “a warning sign” and expressed deep concern about the “IRS’s inability to keep data secure in-house” adding that it “raises serious questions about the agency’s ability to protect the financial information of millions of taxpayers whose records will be turned over to private sector debt collectors.”

Kelley’s concerns were echoed on Capitol Hill yesterday during a hearing of the House Transportation and Treasury Appropriations Subcommittee on the agency’s FY 2006 budget. Rep. Ed Pastor (D-AZ) told the commissioner that he was not confident that the IRS had adequate security systems in place to protect the sensitive financial information of taxpayers once it is in the hands of private collection agencies.

NTEU strongly opposes an IRS plan to use private sector debt collectors to collect federal income taxes. Under the IRS scheme, taxpayers’ personal financial information, including Social Security numbers, would be turned over to private companies with no assurances that the information will be kept secure and confidential.

The recent GAO report points to the “significant amount of personal and financial data” collected by the IRS on every American, and emphasizes that “the confidentiality of this sensitive information must be protected; otherwise, taxpayers could be exposed to loss of privacy and to financial loss and damages resulting from identity theft or other financial crimes.”

GAO reported that 21 of 53 weaknesses in IRS information security procedures and practices identified by it in a 2002 report remain uncorrected—and it identifies an additional 39 such weaknesses that have developed since then.

GAO called information security “especially important for government agencies, where the public’s trust is essential,” such as in the IRS, and noted that persistent information security weaknesses place the data at risk of disruption, fraud and inappropriate disclosure.

Kelley once again called on Congress to approve bipartisan legislation, H.R. 1621, introduced last week by Reps. Rob Simmons (R-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that would revoke the IRS’s authority, given to it in an unrelated tax bill last year, to privatize tax debt collection. Under the plan, private sector debt collectors would be entitled to a bounty of up to 25 percent of the money they collect.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 98,000 in the IRS.