IRS employees tossed confidential tax information in the trash: report

Employees at the Internal Revenue Service reportedly mishandled people's confidential tax information, the libertarian site Reason wrote on Tuesday.

"The IRS receives and creates a significant volume of sensitive documents and is responsible for protecting these sensitive documents from receipt to disposal," stated a report by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Standard procedure requires tax officials to "shred, burn, mulch, pulp, or pulverize sensitive documents beyond recognition and reconstruction," noted Reason — but on some occasions these documents were simply thrown away in the trash, potentially compromising that information.

Since 2009, said Reason, an unnamed vendor "services '387 (75 percent) of 514 IRS facilities,' the report notes, while another 17 facilities contract with local companies. But for the rest, it's apparently a free-for-all: 'We found that the IRS is unaware of what sensitive document destruction capabilities are in place for the 110 facilities not covered under a contract. For example, the IRS initially thought the Andover, Massachusetts, facility was covered by a local sensitive document destruction contract. After we inquired about the contract, the IRS discovered that this facility was not covered by any contract.'"

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Auditors who visited the site, according to the report, then found "trash containers being used for all waste, including sensitive documents that contained tax information and Personally Identifiable Information."

Tax information for individuals is confidential by law, both to prevent identity theft and to prevent government officials from hunting through political opponents' returns for excuses to harass them. From time to time this is a matter of controversy, however, particularly with respect to President-elect Donald Trump refusing to release his tax information for years, which ultimately included a litany of shady business practices.

This comes at a moment when an internal IRS employee, Charles Littlejohn, is facing prison time for leaking tax information on Trump and several other billionaires; some political observers are urging President Joe Biden to pardon him, arguing he acted in the public interest and noting that his sentence is harsher than most people receive for tax evasion itself.