Are Your Tax-Returns For Sale?
The Seattle Times reports: “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers, for the first time, will be able to sell information from individual returns  or even entire returns  to marketers and data brokers.” (Hat tip: reader belayslave)
With tax day less than a month away, here’s something new to worry about. As if we needed it.
The possible change is raising alarm among consumer and privacy-rights advocates. It was included in a set of proposed rules that the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them “not a significant regulatory action.”
IRS officials portray the proposed changes as house-cleaning measures needed to update outmoded regulations that were adopted before the IRS began accepting returns electronically. The proposed rules, which would become effective 30 days after a final version is published, would require a tax preparer to obtain written consent before selling tax information.
What kind of rules are these? Afterall, who would give consent to selling their private information and why? It’s not like the client would be compensated for it. Which makes it even more suspicious, because a tax preparer wouldn’t want to make a big deal of it. Just slip it in, so to speak.
Critics call the proposed changes a dangerous new breach in personal and financial privacy. They say the requirement for signed consent would prove meaningless for many taxpayers, especially those hurriedly reviewing stacks of documents before a filing deadline.
“The normal interaction is that the taxpayer just signs what the tax preparer puts in front of them,” said Jean Ann Fox of the Consumer Federation of America, one of several groups fighting the changes. “They think, ‘This person is a tax professional, and I’m going to rely on them.’ “
Read the whole thing.
Especially the fine print before you sign.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:49 am
Let’s see. It is getting increasingly easier to commit identity theft and harder to keep from being a victim of identity theft.
Since the advent of the www, and with the loosening of rules concerning Social Security number identification (I’m old enough to remember when it was illegal to use one’s SSN for anything except official Social Security business), identity theft has skyrocketed.
Now the IRS wishes to make even more information available to the thieves and potential thieves. Of course, they’ll “vet” anyone who wishes to buy information from them thoroughly. I’m sure the IRS will do as good a job as any other guvmint agency in accomplishing that.
Yep, sure makes me feel Uncle Sugar has my best interests at heart.