IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/irs-accidentally-releases-112-000-taxpayers-private-data-again

by arkadiyt • 4 years ago

265 63 4 years ago

news.bloombergtax.com

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

Accenture is the contractor responsible.

nvdrx• 4 years ago

Perfect. It’s not like the gov to pass the buck to a corpo.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

IMO the resposibility is entirely on IRS. They chose the contractor, they wrote the legal terms and conditions, they vetted them out and they presumably did the due diligence for security.

latency-guy2• 4 years ago

They also provided them with training, access rights, and general governance over the data.

I'd personally blame 70% of the blame on the IRS, 30% on the contractor. Organizations should not be able to skirt blame by way of contractor IMO. Hope the IRS gets fined for gross negligence and breach of data. (lol)

acdha• 4 years ago

Here’s the problem: government contracting is complicated enough that only a few companies can wade through it and the overhead encourages big general services contracts so you don’t have to repeat that process every time someone wants to setup a Wordpress blog. Those companies put in bids featuring their key staff, who are qualified. That’s who the government meets with and who answers all of the questions.

Contractors come and go, and the government isn’t supposed to micromanage them - that’s one of the features theoretically making them less expensive than staff - so those qualified people may never be seen after the start of the project, or they might be in some kind of “oversight” capacity where they’re quintuple booked theoretically keeping the much cheaper people doing the actual work from failing too badly.

On the government side, they likely don’t have qualified technical staff (or enough of their time) after years of “cost savings” where every dollar cut from the staff budget corresponds to 2-3 dollars going to contractors. That means that problems will progress further, especially because the contract PM isn’t going to say that the contract developers are doing terribly after months of saying sprint velocity is good. Even if they’re on different contracts, the odds are good they’ve either worked together before or don’t want to rule out future work at the other company.

So, things careened down the tracks and now people are realizing that the green lights on dashboards were in fact optimistic. The government can ask for things to be fixed but if there’s pushback, they risk _every_ project on that contract and it’s expensive because they have to show some kind of malfeasance to get money back or possibly even to stop wasting more (want to bet there’s never been any scope creep which could be blamed?). It’s _much_ easier to try seeing whether the claim that this was a one-time mishap was true than to deal with all of that.

Any time you see something like this, it’s always possible that you have someone totally failing to do their job but it’s far more likely that you’re seeing a bunch of people trying to do their best with a system they know isn’t effective but which they have no direct means to improve.

andreareina• 4 years ago

That the buck stops with the IRS (agree with you there) doesn't absolve Accenture of its responsibility to the IRS.

yucky3• 4 years ago

My agreement is with the IRS, not Accenture.

The IRS is 100% responsible.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

I agree with your assessment of responsibility, but it’s not clear the extent that your obligation to the IRS is even an “agreement”.

mistrial93• 4 years ago

the forms in question are US non-profit declarations 990-T. The same data was released a second time, minus less than 2% of them. There are a lot of dark corners in the USA non-profit world, in case you don't know it. The vast majority (a million?) of USA 990 non-profits are the sort of small time operation you might expect, but there is a tiger of a long-tail on that one. Many major hospitals and the US Football league NFL, are "non-profit" and would file the same forms.

gumby2• 4 years ago

The US Football league NFL also has an antitrust exemption so is deserving of public scrutiny.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

NCAA is predicted to go for antitrust exemptions as well as lobby for legislation to dump the requirement to pay student athletes - all things Baker is expected to do, leveraging his political connections as a former governor and figure in the republican party.

yucky3• 4 years ago

I don't believe this is correct, which is why competing leagues pop up every few years.

You might be thinking of Major League Baseball?

bmelton2• 4 years ago

US Football league NFL, are "non-profit"

This is not true now, and arguably never was (at least not with the intention it's generally applied).

The NFL relinquished its tax exempt status in 2015, but even before that the NFL was not a 501(c)(3) but a 501(c)(6) (a trade organization) -- for interests of fairness (proven more necessary recently by actions of the Washington Commanders) the NFL collected ticket moneys and broadcast earnings and then distributed the money to the teams, where it was taxed. Without that, they'd have been taxed on the collection and on the disbursement, which would have meant that the teams were taxed twice.

There are, to my opinion anyway, better reasons to be mad at the NFL than as a tax dodge, because they weren't ever particularly good at meeting the definition.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tax-season/

mistrial93• 4 years ago

does a 501(c)(6) file a form 990-T ?

mistrial93• 4 years ago

This is not true now, and arguably never was

you mean to say in your first breath that the 501(c) series of US IRS tax structures are not called "non-profit" but then in the next breath confirm that the NFL was in fact 501(c)(6) ?

I do not say I was "mad" so, let's not include that as a summary of what I wrote, eh?

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

Fortunately my opaque non profit files a different 990

Lionga• 4 years ago

Ooopsie

dossy• 4 years ago

"The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, according to a person familiar."

Any time I start to feel that Impostor Syndrome creeping in, I need to remind myself that there's someone who's working at Accenture probably earning 2x or 3x what I am, who gets to fuck up big not once but _twice_ doing the same wrong thing.

ipsum22• 4 years ago

Doesn't Accenture offshore a lot of its work to India and other third-world countries?

So the Accenture engineer probably gets paid a lot less than you.

Edit: According to Wikipedia, yes:

In 2015, the company had about 150,000 employees in India,[31] 48,000 in the US,[32] and 50,000 in the Philippines.[33]

Edit2: s/outsource/offshore, thanks. What I intended was: companies hire Accenture to outsource their development work to third-world countries.

birdymcbird• 4 years ago

And is far less qualified too.

I’ve crossed paths with these “consulting” types twice in my career. I don’t mean to generalize, but these so called “engineers” didn’t understand source control or versioning, didn’t understand basic programming concepts, and lacked any sort of communication skills.

It seemed like you were working with someone who watched a couple YouTube videos (and no more than a couple videos) on some framework, with no former programming, design, or critical thinking skills, and they were now given a job title.

runako• 4 years ago

> In 2015, the company had about 150,000 employees in India,[31] 48,000 in the US,[32] and 50,000 in the Philippines.[33]

Pedantic: Accenture assigning work to their employees in India or the Philippines is not "outsourcing." The work was outsourced when it was handed off from the client paying the bills to Accenture, regardless of where the Accenture employees are located. By definition, Accenture cannot outsource work to their own employees.

"Offshoring" is what Accenture does by having the work done by their employees in lower-cost regions.

cscurmudgeon3• 4 years ago

So the Accenture engineer probably gets paid a lot less than you.

Given that roughly 1/3 of Accenture employees are in the US, is there any evidence for you to believe that this was someone outside the US?

usosmat• 4 years ago

No, government contractors do not staff foreign nationals to US projects.

US contractor labor rates are typically below market, and typically auditable as GSA labor rates (T&M).

It’s possible there was “outsourcing” to some lower-income area in the US. Most large firms setup large dev factories in the Midwest/south-Midwest.

giantg2• 4 years ago

One caveat to your logic... some sensitive pieces of financial information cannot be offshore. We've had to use onshore contractors because regulations wouldn't allow us to use offshore for some of our sensitive financial data in the system, and I think it also covered SSNs.

Although I would still guess that for reasons other than being offshore, they are earning market or less (or overworked to reduce any higher comp to lower effective hourly rates).

protastus• 4 years ago

Accenture relies on a revolving door of young, cheap, inexperienced labor.

A developer in the U.S. has far better employment options.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

In the EU they did near-shoring to Ukraine... it's a shit show.

throwawaysleep• 4 years ago

They are like IBM. They can fail at everything forever and still get work.

jermaustin1• 4 years ago

Everyone I've met at accenture actually was paid below market, and usually billed at 5x their cost, or more.

ZephyrBlu• 4 years ago

You can check how much they're earning: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/accenture/salaries/software...

_ea1k• 4 years ago

To be fair, they probably have hours of meetings telling them about the importance of compliance and the dozens of onerous security related administrative burdens that go with it.

It can be hard to do the real important security stuff when burdened by the administrative security and audit requirements requisite with government work.

A lot of smart people leave in frustration.

sircastor• 4 years ago

Title should probably read IRS Contractor accidentally releases the data again…

This is bad of course, but I’m kind of amazed it was only 112k. Given the 330some million citizens, and presumably some more entities that also pay taxes, this is a relatively small number.

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

Hey. Mr. Wimbley, it happened again.

tiahura2• 4 years ago

I'm less concerned about the occasional unintentional f'up, and much more concerned about the targeted and politically motivated intentional leaking of information.

ComputerGuru3• 4 years ago

Are you saying “I’m not concerned about data leaks that I could potentially be affected by and have my own personal information leaked through as much as I am about a celebrity billionaire getting their tax records released after years of litigation and after lawsuits going all the way to the Supreme Court (or others like him)?”

AmericanChopper2• 4 years ago

I would say I find government corruption to be more concerning than government incompetence. For the same reason that I would find a crime committed with intent to be more concerning than a crime committed with negligence. Neither are unconcerning though.

tiahura2• 4 years ago

No. I was talking about https://www.golocalprov.com/news/hedge-fund-manager-sues-irs...

johncessna• 4 years ago

I think I know the problem, they probably don't have one of those 25 minute annual data governance trainings to teach/remind them how to handle PII.

godelski2• 4 years ago

I think I know the solution, we'll double the training session (we'll use the same training, but make them spend an hour on the same material and time them) and have them do it twice a year! That'll surely reduce error rates by a quarter!

dumbotron• 4 years ago

The place I work for (not the government) actually started blocking USB storage devices because of the risk of data leaks. Too many of them involve misplaced flash drives.

ccn0p• 4 years ago

What they really need are more agents. I think 87,000 should do the trick.

tamaharbor• 4 years ago

My new thesis is that an increasing number of problems is caused by human stupidity. We are entering a world as depicted by the movie Idiocracy.

khiqxj• 4 years ago

this could be solved by not requiring collection of citizens' private info at gunpoint. but im sure all the idiots who reacted to snowden by building half working "solutions" with "please donate" buttons will not get this.

godelski2• 4 years ago

What a hostile website. I land on the page, a second goes by and then I get a flashing screen that redirects me... to the same page. A few more seconds go by and then I see a "validating credentials" loading message and again just get redirected to the same page. I'm sure my privacy plugins have something to do with this but come on, why do we need to do all this redirecting for just a web article? This could essentially be static!

autoexec• 4 years ago

You're not blocking enough. The site actually manages to display text even with JS disabled which is more than I can for some others.

vladsanchez• 4 years ago

IRS: Fucking IDIOTS! No Liability, No accountability! Who can SUE the IRS!? :/

hansvm• 4 years ago

While we're at it, what ever happened to the ID.me clusterfuck from earlier this year? As of February they said it wouldn't be mandatory, but all accounts are still being urged to switch to that privacy nightmare.

IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

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