More than 300,000 taxpayer accounts with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been breached, as well as more than 600,000 attempts on accounts, according to new revelations made public by the tax-collecting agency, The Wall Street Journal first reported Monday. On Monday, the IRS said that it found the nearly 400,000 other attempts after a deeper dive that analyzed more than 23 million uses of IRS systems.
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As before, the IRS said it would move immediately to notify affected taxpayers and take other steps, including offering free credit protection and special identification numbers to reduce instances of tax-refund fraud. The agency is also contacting all 390,000 of the households who they most recently discovered were targeted, warning taxpayers even when identity thieves were unable to break into IRS systems.
The tax-collection agency said it realized the total number of victims was twice as high after it conducted “an extensive review covering the 2015 filing season”.
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The breaches occurred in an online application called “Get Transcript” that allowed taxpayers to obtain prior-year return information.
