feIRS: Thieves Obtained Information On 100,000 Taxpayers From Transcript System

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(Jimmybionic)

A tax transcript is a document from the IRS that shows key information from tax returns that you’ve already filed, or changes to what you and the government owe each other that may have been made after the return was filed. You can normally order them online, but the system is now closed after the IRS learned that people identified only as “thieves” accessed transcripts for about 100,000 people.

If you’re one of the unlucky 100,000, the IRS says that they will contact you so you can take precautions. To access a person’s transcript, someone would need some key personal information about them that isn’t all that hard to find, like their Social Security number, tax filing status, address, and birthdate. While a stolen tax return can be very valuable to an identity thief, the culprits would have already used the most important pieces of personal data to obtain the transcripts in the first place.

The main filing system was not breached, the IRS assures the public: only the system that generates transcripts. The same group of thieves made an estimated 200,000 attempts from what the agency called “questionable email domains” to request transcripts with ill-gotten personal information.

APNewsBreak: IRS says thieves stole tax info from 100,000 [Associated Press]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist