IRS Left Taxpayer Data Vulnerable and Lied About It 79
Bruce66423 writes with news that the IRS hasn't made much progress improving its poor IT security. From the article: "The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS had only partially implemented 42 percent of the corrective plans it checked off as completed in recent years. ...
The review (PDF) showed that the IRS failed to properly track its progress toward completing many of the fixes auditors had recommended in recent years. The agency closed most of the cases without adequate documentation and did not always upload the necessary information into a database that helps ensure compliance."
Re:Say it ain't so! (Score:4, Insightful)
Gentlemen, engage your confirmation biases.
From the article (Score:5, Insightful)
The IRS said in its response to the findings that it issued a new manual this year to help improve its monitoring practices and that the agency would audit completed actions in the future.
So, if I file the wrong kind of taxes, can I take the same sort of stance? "Yeah yeah, I know I filled out the form totally with the wrong numbers, and made it look like I needed a huge return, but I've purchased a new pen, and I've trained myself to better understand the form. So in the future, I will do better."
I'm tired of hearing so much wrong done by our governing body, and never hear of any repercussions.
Consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the punishment for not securing taxpayer data is... nothing? So why bother fixing anything?
Re:That word, "lying", stop using it (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah but that sort of logic won't allow people to add a poorly understood event to their "LIST OF REASONS WHY IRS (AND GOV IN GENERAL) IS EVIL AND SHUD BE ELIMINATED".
We could be happy that government is so open that even the tax collectors are audited, and a public announcement is made when they are judged to have not complied sufficiently. If only everything was so well overseen. (and, no, I don't have a hard on for tax collectors, but half my family was brought under a dictatorship, so I know what it looks like when a government is not accountable.)
Re:Say it ain't so! (Score:4, Insightful)
The US government - which in its current form has led the world's leading/only superpower for over a century - is "incompetent"? No, my friend. It might be miles from perfect. It might be partly corrupted by power and the powerful (though it experiences nothing like the corruption of some governments). It might fuck up royally from time to time. But, as an organisation, as a whole over time, it is as far from "incompetent" as any large organisation can hope to be.
And I say this as someone who doesn't think of the US government as particularly moral. I just think it's fucking good at what it does, which is why it's where it is, and my country is not.
Re: Say it ain't so! (Score:5, Insightful)
For 99.7% of Americans, what he said was correct. For the 0.3% of Americans that were paying for inadequate coverage, he was wrong.
Wow talk about spinning, I'm sure you can explain that to the 20-30m or so who've already lost their insurance, and if the estimates are accurate upto another 85m are going to lose theirs in the next 6 months.
And Barack never made the claim absolute the way you have spun it.
Really? "If you like your insurance you can keep it. Period." "If you like your doctor you can keep them. Period" Odd, those seem to be absolutes. Perhaps you should get away from the Media Matters and DNC talking points.