IRS Indifferent to Hacking Incident

Apparently the arrogance of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knows no bounds. Facing questions about the ease by which hackers accessed the tax returns of more than 100,000 Americans from February to mid-May, he remained unapologetic. “These are actually organized crime syndicates that not only we but everybody in the financial industry are dealing with,” he declared — before boasting about the agency’s ability to stop approximately half the attacks.

Koskinen also offered up an exercise in semantics. “This is not a hack or data breach. These are impostors pretending to be someone,” he said according to The Wall Street Journal. Technically the Commissioner is correct in that the IRS systems themselves weren’t compromised. But one suspects the efforts, now attributed to Russian hackers engaged in a sophisticated scheme to claim fraudulent tax refunds, will be scant comfort to American taxpayers waiting for those refunds. Furthermore, Americans might not have known about the source of the attack at all: two officials contacting Breitbart News “spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation,” the website reported.

The hackers used Social Security numbers, street addresses and other critical information obtained elsewhere to complete a multistep authorization process. It allowed them to gain access and request refunds and other filings, the IRS admitted. Before detecting the scheme, the agency sent out nearly $50 million in refunds. As a result the IRS has temporarily shut down its “Get Transcript” application that had allowed taxpayers to access their own information.

Perhaps Koskinen and company see this as an improvement. In 2013, the IRS paid out a whopping $5.8 billion in fraudulently claimed refunds.

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