Twenty-six IRS Tapes Missing in Kansas City
Posted by Kaustuv M. Das
On Friday, January 19, 2007, The Kansas City Star reported that twenty-six Internal Revenue Service tapes had gone missing from City Hall in Kansas City, Missouri. The IRS had provided the tapes to the municipality of Kansas City as part of “a regular information-sharing agreement between the IRS and the city.” Kansas City uses federal taxpayer information to enforce a local earnings tax paid by people who live or work in the city.
The IRS sent the tapes to Kansas City in August 2006. According to The Kansas City Star, efforts to find the tapes began back in November. Neither the IRS nor Kansas City officials are willing to comment on what sort of information was contained in the tapes, but typically such tapes will contain names, Social Security numbers, and income information. It is not clear whether the data on the IRS tapes was encrypted, although the initial Kansas City Star report stated that there was some form of protection that required special equipment to unlock the tapes. Although the report did not say whether the protection was physical or involved some sort of electronic measures, the tapes were written in “an uncommon programming language” and Assistant City Manager Noll said, “It is not something you could just load onto your laptop.” One can’t help but conjecture that the greatest protection these tapes have is obsolescence.
Because Missouri is one of the only fifteen states that do not have data breach notification laws, City Hall was not required to notify any Kansas City residents of the loss of the tapes. Were it not for the report in The Kansas City Star it is unclear that the loss of these tapes would ever have come to light. Congress has taken steps to secure personal data for veterans by passing the “Veterans Benefits, Health Care, and Information Technology Act of 2006.” This latest report out of Kansas City shows why it is important that Congress extend the same protections to everyone in the country.