Political Quotes

“Madam President, more than a year ago, a news website by the name of ProPublica published stories that it claims are based on ``a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.'' Since then, ProPublica has continued to publish articles that appear to use data leaked or hacked from the IRS. Despite questions from Congress and immediate expressions of concern from the Treasury Department, as well as the IRS, we don't know any more today than we did a year ago. Even though these apparent leaks of confidential taxpayer information appear to target the wealthy, not just the wealthy but all taxpayers and anyone who cares about effective tax administration should be very concerned. The fact is, until we get answers, we don't know if anyone's tax return or other information submitted to the IRS is actually secure. At the end of the 2022 filing system, more than 145 million individual income tax returns had been filed with the IRS. Right now, we don't know if there is a current vulnerability to the IRS's systems that makes this personal information accessible within the IRS or to bad actors outside of the IRS. We do not know if a foreign nation with hostile intentions is responsible for a leak or a hack of taxpayer information or the full scope of the IRS's information that may be involved.…”