Originally published February 21 2006
IRS plan to hire contractors becoming a security concern
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Government Accountability Office and the National Treasury Employees Union have raised security concerns about the IRS plan to hire outside contractors to find deadbeat taxpayers.
The Internal Revenue Service by March expects to award contracts to three private-sector companies to help the agency improve its ability to track down deadbeat taxpayers.
Yet despite carefully worded security stipulations written into the IRS's request for quotes from prospective contractors, concerns remain regarding the government and the business world's ability to adequately protect sensitive information.
The act created Section 6206 of the Internal Revenue Code permitting contractors to be used to help collect taxes in cases where the tax owed is not in dispute.
The IRS, which started looking for contractors last October, says using them for debt collection will help increase the amount of tax liabilities collected each year, leading to an estimated additional $1.4 billion dollars in tax revenue over the next 10 years.
Due to the extreme sensitivity of tax data, the IRS, which expects to process about 135 million individual tax returns in 2006, is requiring all work done by contractors to be performed within the United States.
Contractors also have to agree to purge taxpayer financial information from their IT systems once their work on a given taxpayer account is completed.
Contractor IT systems must meet Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 standards and track the location of tax returns and return information at all times.
But both the Government Accountability Office and the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 94,000 employees of the Treasury Department as well as another 60,000 employees in other federal agencies and departments, have questioned the IRS's ability to properly manage contracted employees in the past.
The GAO, which is Congress's investigative arm, has criticized the IRS over its diligence in contractor background investigations.
The business world's track record of protecting customer data does little to improve the public's confidence.
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