International Banksters have a new collection scheme

The evilarchy that controls this nation has a plan to collect taxes with private contractors; this is how the international bankers will collect the interest on the massive United States debt as the country's infrastructure starts to buckle. Just think of all of the injustices that we are to see in the future.

IRS Plan To Outsource Tax Collection Raises Security Concerns

By Larry Greenemeier, InformationWeek
11:00 AM EST Fri. Jan. 13, 2006

The Internal Revenue Service by March expects to award contracts to three private-sector companies to help the agency improve its ability to track down deadbeat taxpayers. Yet despite carefully worded security stipulations written into the IRS's request for quotes from prospective contractors, concerns remain regarding the government and the business world's ability to adequately protect sensitive information.

President Bush gave the IRS the power to use private-sector contractors when he signed the American Jobs Creation Act in October 2004. The act created Section 6206 of the Internal Revenue Code permitting contractors to be used to help collect taxes in cases where the tax owed is not in dispute. The IRS, which started looking for contractors last October, says using them for debt collection will help increase the amount of tax liabilities collected each year, leading to an estimated additional $1.4 billion dollars in tax revenue over the next 10 years.

"Taxpayer information on file with the IRS is and will remain private and secure," an IRS spokeswoman said Thursday. Contractors will only be able to communicate with taxpayers via telephone or written correspondences, except under special circumstances.

The contractor program will run on a trial basis for a year after the contracts are awarded, with the option for another year if all goes well. Full program implementation is planned for January 2008. The contractors will help the agency collect a portion of the estimated $12 billion in taxes individuals have acknowledged they owe but have not paid. The contractors stand to receive up to 25% of the tax money they help to collect.

Due to the extreme sensitivity of tax data, the IRS, which expects to process about 135 million individual tax returns in 2006, is requiring all work done by contractors to be performed within the United States. Contractors also have to agree to purge taxpayer financial information from their IT systems once their work on a given taxpayer account is completed. If the contractor isn't able to immediately purge this data, they are responsible for protecting that data from unauthorized inspections or disclosures. Contractor IT systems must meet Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 standards and track the location of tax returns and return information at all times.

But both the Government Accountability Office and the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 94,000 employees of the Treasury Department as well as another 60,000 employees in other federal agencies and departments, have questioned the IRS's ability to properly manage contracted employees in the past.

The GAO, which is Congress's investigative arm, has criticized the IRS over its diligence in contractor background investigations. In an April 27, 2005 letter to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, GAO Financial Management and Assurance director Steven Sebastian identified a number of internal control issues at the IRS that "adversely affected safeguarding of tax receipts and information, refunds to taxpayers, and lien resolutions."

Sebastian's letter also notes that at three IRS service centers his group investigated, some contractors were granted staff-like access to restricted areas, including IRS-owned or controlled facilities, information systems, security items and products, or sensitive but unclassified information, despite not having undergone background investigations. This increased the risk that "taxpayer receipts and information could be lost, stolen, misused, or destroyed," Sebastian wrote. During his team's fiscal year 2004 audit, they found the IRS didn't submit new security clearance paperwork for 10 contractors until four years after the contractors had already been granted staff-like access.

In response to the GAO report, the IRS stated that it has "implemented steps" to monitor and enforce existing requirements related to background checks for contractors.

The IRS also is getting pressure from the Treasury Department's employee union to use government employees rather than contractors. The National Treasury Employees Union, unsurprisingly, believes that IRS employees could do the same job cheaper and better. The union is pushing for passage of H.R. 1621, a House of Representatives bill sponsored by Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., that would revoke the IRS's authority to hire private debt collectors.

Concerns over the government's ability to protect sensitive citizen data extends to other federal agencies as well. The Justice Department failed to remove several Social Security numbers from its Web site, www.usdoj.gov. For example, the Social Security number of a woman involved in a 2003 immigration-review case was included in documentation about the case. Additional site searches yielded other peoples' numbers in a half-dozen other places.

The business world's track record of protecting customer data does little to improve the public's confidence. People's Bank has joined the unenviable, but growing, list of companies that have mishandled customer data. The financial institution acknowledged Thursday that a backup tape containing personal information on 90,000 customers was lost while being transported by UPS to credit reporting bureau TransUnion. The tapes contained names, addresses, and bank account and Social Security numbers for customers who have a form of checking account overdraft protection called personal credit lines.

Membership in the "Oops, I lost your data" club continues to grow. Hopefully, the IRS and other handlers of sensitive information will learn from their predecessors.