The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said on Friday it accidentally exposed but has since removed the confidential financial information of about 120,000 taxpayers.
In a letter to Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Treasury Department acting Assistant Secretary for Management Anna Canfield Roth wrote that the IRS “recently identified an inadvertent and now-corrected disclosure of a subset of Forms 990-T,” and that “the inadvertent disclosure included limited information for approximately 120,000 individuals.”
Form 990-T (pdf) is the business tax return form used by tax-exempt entities to report business income or investments that are unrelated to their exempt purpose. Tax-exempt entities include certain organizations, government entities, and retirement accounts. Individuals who use this form mainly include people whose individual retirement accounts (IRAs) have investments, including in real estate or other assets, that generate income….