Hackers ate my tax return

The tax collectors at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had little to celebrate last Friday on the tax filing deadline. Because the same day the Government Accountability Office published a report revealing 60 vulnerabilities in the IRS's computer system. (click here to download a one page summary)

To add insult to injury, the IRS had been notified about 21 of these security holes during an earlier audit in 2002.

Not only is the security lacking, the organisation doesn’t even have the proper technology to monitor if its systems have been hacked and records have been altered.

As a tax payer you might be worried about the IRS's inability to properly secure their mainframe computer. But it also gives you a chance for the ideal defence during an audit: the IRS can't guarantee that it's records are accurate. Unless they have paper evidence, you can always argue that some hacker is responsible for that error in your tax return.