Tax Lawyer's Blog

WebCPA reports that Internal Revenue Service employees often fail to properly determine the identity of taxpayers calling its toll-free assistance lines before providing them with confidential tax account information:

The report, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, found that taxpayers who call the IRS-toll-free lines are at risk of having their personally identifiable information inadvertently overheard and disclosed during conversations with IRS employees. TIGTA auditors listened to a sample of audio-taped calls between IRS employees and taxpayers and were able to hear parts of assistors’ conversations with other callers.

IRS guidelines require assistors to fully authenticate callers before assisting them. Assistors are not always authenticating taxpayers who call the IRS’ toll-free telephone number for tax account information.

From a statistical sample of 180 contact recordings, assistors did not properly follow procedures when authenticating 29 callers, increasing the risk of unauthorized disclosures. This included nine assistors who did not ask callers the two additional authentication probes (high-risk questions) when the situation required, eight assistors that did not ask callers all five required authentication questions, and 12 assistors who did not authenticate callers for various other reasons.

TIGTA auditors were able to hear parts of assistors’ conversations with other callers in 48 of the 180 sampled calls. This happened because assistors did not put callers on hold when they were researching the taxpayers’ accounts. For 26 calls, assistors repeated the Social Security number back to the caller on the telephone.

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