People weren’t sure what it could be used for and who’s doing this and why. They didn’t actually steal medical records instead they grabbed stuff like names, birthdays, medical IDs, social security numbers, street addresses, e-mail addresses, employee information, and income data. So just in the first quarter of 2015 we saw almost one hundred million patient records get pinched by hackers. Discovered around the same time was Premera Blue Cross and they found that possibly the same actors were in their network and admitted to a breach of eleven million patient records. In February, Anthem announced that eighty million patient records were stolen. Starting the year off were two big breaches from healthcare providers.
#Turbotax 2015 free state hack full#
JACK:Ē015 was a year full of data breaches. JACK (INTRO): These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. Combine the dwindling staff and the budget cuts with aging equipment and computers and you can start to see that this could become a serious problem, and a problem for the IRS is a dream come true for hackers. JACK:Ę7,000 employees and only 650 of them are under twenty-five? That’s like, less than 1%. We have only 650 employees out of 87,000 who are twenty-five or younger. We expect to lose another 3,000 more or less through attrition by the end of this year. You can already start to guess what kind of impact this may have on an organization.ĬOMM’R:ěetween 20 the IRS lost over 13,000 employees. JACK:ğrom 2010 to 2015 the budget had gone down by 20%. It means that both enforcement and tax payer service will suffer.
But after five years of budget cuts and a hiring freeze that has lasted for four years, people need to understand that the IRS is going to have to do less with less. While our budget has been shrinking however, the taxpayer base has grown by millions. If you adjust for inflation our budget is now comparable to where we were in 1998. Again, here’s the commissioner from 2015.ĬOMM’R: The IRS is now at its lowest level of funding since 2008.
There are problems first of all, the budget is shrinking. A lot has to be done to protect the IRS from attackers. Three trillion dollars is a lot of money that travels through the IRS’s fingers and something I’ve learned over the years is that if that kind of money is going through an organization, it’s going to attract criminals and hackers like a hound dog attracts fleas. JACK: That’s the IRS Commissioner himself. JACK: Internal Revenue Service is the American tax collection agency and guess how much money they collect every year from American taxpayers.ĬOMM’R: We collect three trillion dollars a year in a voluntary compliance system.