Iowa — Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is calling for an investigation of the Internal Revenue Service after a watchdog report found the agency lost the backup data from millions of taxpayers’ returns.
Grassley says a fortune has been spent to upgrade IRS technology in recent years, money which he says evidently wasn’t a good investment.
Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, says IRS bungling has led to pallets full of tax records either going missing or being left in insecure locations. In one case, the agency sent dozens of cartridges containing some 200-thousand photos of tax records to an outside contractor for reformatting. That contractor went out of business in 2018 and the records vanished.
The American people deserve better, Grassley says, and they deserve an IRS that prioritizes protecting their confidential information.
Grassley says the information contained in the lost records can be used by “nefarious actors” to commit tax fraud and identity theft. He says there must be accountability to prevent this type of misconduct from happening again.
