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IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

news.bloombergtax.com

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#51

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.

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!

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#52
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!

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#53
post #16

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

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)?”

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

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#54
post #17
post #6

> "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.

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 developm…

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

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

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#55

Accenture is the contractor responsible.

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.

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.

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

even in the US accenture's IT is not known for high wages. The only reason people stay there is being enslaved by US work visa like L-1, which allows Accenture to pay below market wage and keep employees on a short leash. You won't be able to find a single american software engineer in Accenture, because of work conditions and wages, all engineers are foreigners on visas. The only americans there are salesmen and adm…

> You won't be able to find a single american software engineer in Accenture, because of work conditions and wages, all engineers are foreigners on visas.

That is false.

You do know that legally Accenture has to go above market wages in that locale for H1B workers?

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?”

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

I will not disagree with you there (have an upvote on me), but (not that we can know without it being investigated) that seems to be a straightforward case of employee theft of proprietary documents and data from their employer. If so, that’s something that absolutely should be prosecuted but it’s not a case of systematic/organization corruption (although willfully declining to investigate what happened might very well be).

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#58
post #41
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A trust or monopoly doesn't prevent competitive companies forming, just makes it very hard for them to succeed. Baseball has an exemption due to a court case, though their hiring cartel was broken in the courts, resulting in free agency (same for NFL, with the Roselle(?) case). But the important one is all about the money: monopoly control over monetization of broadcast. I direct you to 15 U.S. Code § 1291 which you…

That only applies to TV broadcasting rights agreements between teams, it's nothing like the actual league antitrust arrangement MLB has. This is why you always see competing leagues springing up in football, but not baseball.

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#59
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

Apologies for failing to quote the entirety of relevance. My statement isn't that they aren't a non-profit, but that their status as a non-profit isn't particularly suitable for inclusion in a case of "dark corners" of non-profit organizations.

If that wasn't what you were trying to do, then I apologize for letting my confirmation bias get in the way of more accurately addressing the criticism.

Re: IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again

#60

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.

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.
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