IRS Pulls Roughly 120,000 Confidential Records From Its Website

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) says it accidentally exposed confidential records of some taxpayers via the Tax Exempt Organization Search (TEOS) tool on its website.

“The IRS recently discovered that some machine-readable (XML) Form 990-T data made available for bulk download section on the Tax Exempt Organization Search (TEOS) should not have been made public,” it says(Opens in a new window). “This section is primarily used by those with the ability to use machine-readable data; other more widely used sections of TEOS are unaffected.”

Form 990-T(Opens in a new window) is used by tax exempt organizations to report a variety of information, such as “unrelated business income” and “proxy tax liability,” to the IRS. (The revenue service says the form’s primarily used by “tax-exempt organizations, government entities, and retirement accounts.”) FedScoop reports(Opens in a new window) that approximately 120,000 people file this form each year.

The Wall Street Journal reports(Opens in a new window) that the Treasury Department has determined that the exposed records included a filer’s name, contact information, and certain financial data but “didn’t include Social Security numbers, full individual income information, or other data that could affect a taxpayer’s credit,” per a letter the department sent to “key members of Congress” on Sept. 2.

“The files have been removed from IRS.gov and will be replaced with updated files in the near future,” the IRS says. “In addition, the IRS also will be working with groups that routinely use the files to remove the erroneous files and replace them with the correct versions as they become available. The IRS will contact all impacted filers in the coming weeks.”