Quick Post: IRS scandal #2

Shady IRS logo for the record company.  Maybe they should switch with the other IRS

I'm behind on blogging and as a result, behind on this new story of more IRS malfeasance.  Or foolishness.  Either way, this is unacceptable.

Via the National Journal:

Another day, another slip up by the Internal Revenue Service.

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of "tens of thousands" of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours after being discovered, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it's a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group's founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency's January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government's website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

So here's the obvious question - were these Tea Party groups?  I have issues with the IRS either way - either it's more persecution of conservative groups, or it's a way to intimate that the IRS is broken but not deliberately working against conservative groups and this is a diversion of anger against the first complaint against the IRS.   There is a third possibility - that the IRS is horribly screwed up and this information came out coincidentally with the other scandal.

More information needs to come out before we can be certain;

(1) Whose info was exposed?

(2) Did it happen after the first scandal, before, or is it part of an on-going pattern of mistakes of this type?

(3) How did the information come to light?

(4) How were those affected by it, affected?

Waiting seems to be the best course of action before making pronouncements on this.