Fergie's Tech Blog

GAO Raps IRS on Information Security (Again)

Paul Roberts writes on InfoWorld's Zero Day Security Blog:

With tax day fast approaching, tens of millions of U.S. residents are preparing to send reams of sensitive personal financial data to the Internal Revenue Service as part of their annual tax filing. That simple fact makes the systems that store that data the worlds fattest target for identity theft.

The big question is: how secure are the IRS's systems for storing taxpayer data.

Not very, according to a report [.pdf] by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In a report released Friday, GAO s said that IRS has made only "limited progress toward correcting or mitigating previously reported information security weaknesses" at two of its data processing sites, and that 66 percent of the information security weaknesses discovered by previous GAO audits still exist.

posted by Fergie @ 3/30/2007 03:42:00 PM