Taxpayer Data At IRS Remains Vulnerable

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @02:53PM from the do-as-i-say dept.

CWmike writes "A new Government Accountability Office report (PDF) finds that taxpayer and other sensitive data continues to remain dangerously underprotected at the IRS. The news comes less than three months after the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that there were major security vulnerabilities in two crucial IRS systems. Two big standouts in the latest finding: The IRS still does not always enforce strong password management rules for identifying and authenticating users of its systems, nor does it encrypt certain types of sensitive data, the GAO said."

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To answer my question by BadAnalogyGuy · 2009-01-13 15:05 · Score: 5, Informative

According to the IG's report, systems administrators and other privileged users are able to access, modify and delete taxpayer data with impunity because of a lack of monitoring capabilities in the two systems.
So it seems that the system allows for modification of taxpayer data. That's quite a bit different from just having it available.