The IRS Wants to Destroy What? More Hard Drives – You Have To Be Kidding Me!
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The IRS notified contractors yesterday that it needs help in destroying at least another 3,200 hard drives.
The IRS states in the contract paperwork, “After all media are destroyed, they must not be capable of any reuse or information retrieval.”
The agency is expecting to need to have destroyed at least 65,464 magnetic tapes, 5,856 floppy disks, 708 reels, and 3,225 hard drives. The IRS has amassed half a million pieces of electronic storage media, some with personally identifiable taxpayer information. More than 375,000 pieces have already been destroyed. The rest await destruction.
“Due to system changes, a significant amount of electronic portable media containing [personally identifiable information] and potentially sensitive but unclassified data such as taxpayer return information is being collected at IRS facilities and locked in secure storage areas awaiting destruction,” a statement of work attached to the solicitation said.
What is actually a routine job, meant to protect sensitive taxpayer information, comes off as totally ironic and laughable in light of the IRS hard drive problems surrounding the targeting scandal that is currently under investigation.
In case you are interested, the contract paperwork can be found here.
Given the issues surrounding the missing and destroyed hard drives in this investigation, it makes one wonder why they don’t wait on destroying thousands more…just to be on the safe side, you think?
