IRS Indifferent to Hacking Incident
Apparently the arrogance of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knows no bounds. Facing questions about the ease by which hackers accessed the tax returns of more than 100,000 Americans from February to mid-May, he remained unapologetic. “These are actually organized crime syndicates that not only we but everybody in the financial industry are dealing with,” he declared—before boasting about the agency’s ability to stop approximately half the attacks.
Koskinen also offered up an exercise in semantics. “This is not a hack or data breach. These are impostors pretending to be someone,” he said according to the Wall Street Journal. Technically the Commissioner is correct in that the IRS systems themselves weren’t compromised. But one suspects the efforts, now attributed to Russian hackers engaged in a sophisticated scheme to claim fraudulent tax refunds, will be scant comfort to American taxpayers waiting for those refunds. Furthermore, Americans might not have known about the source of the attack at all: two officials contacting Breitbart News “spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation,” the website reported.
To read more: IRS Indifferent to Hacking Incident, click here.