Sometimes things just won't go away, and in this case developments continue in the case of the unauthorized access to the IRS's Get Transcript electronic site.

As was previously noted on this blog, the IRS on May 26, 2015 announced in a statement published on the agency’s web page that criminals had obtained access to information about 100,000 taxpayers via unauthorized use of the IRS’s “Get Transcript” application.  In a similar number of cases the perpetrators had attempted to gain access but failed to do so.  The information accessed included Social Security information, date of birth and street address.

On August 17, 2015 the IRS announced the problem was larger than initially revealed, indicating that further research had found that the number of taxpayers who had information accessed was now found to be 330,000—and, a similarly larger number of taxpayer accounts had unsuccessful attempts to access the data.

Identity theft (IDT) related to tax returns has become a growing problem for many of our clients—and we quite often get to break the news to the client when a client’s electronically filed return gets rejected because a return has already been filed.  The IRS brought together a group of interested parties in the tax arena to form a group to work on dealing with the problem.  The parties included state revenue departments and most of the major tax software vendors (including Intuit, CCH and Thompson Reuters).

The group has issued a 2015 Security Summit Report that outlines recommendations for the taxing agencies and tax professionals to attempt to control the identity theft problem.