The United States Internal Revenue Service has now confirmed that a March 30th report by Brian Krebs where he revealed an online portal operated by the IRS for disseminating tax transcripts had been leaking personal information and tax records to parties who ought not to have been authorized to view them. According to the the IRS more than one hundred thousand records were accessed in this manner. This news follows an epic volume of falsified tax returns filed this year sending tax overpayments to fraudsters to the point where major tax preparation companies had to stop handling state tax returns. The gravity of this leak's potential impact on the tenth of a million affected persons can not be underestimated considering the manner in which the fiat state handles identity:

Contributing to the ease with which fraudulent tax filings may be used to get a resident's tax overpayment refunded to a thieving party is a legal and financial system utilized in the United States which by default accepts information about a person as an acceptable surrogate for an actual verifiable signature. This surrogacy of information about a person serving as a surrogate for a signature.

This aberration of information about a person being given equivalence to a signature is a substantial part of why the recent breech of United States health insurance provider Anthem presents a catastrophic scenario for persons whose information was included in the breach. One of the most popular methods of identification for persons seeking financial services or credit in the United States are subjected to involves answering questions to see if the requester can supply answers which are in concordance with the information present in one's credit report.

These services are often offered to businesses by the credit reporting agencies themselves. An example of this is Experian's PreciseID^SM which is offered as:

an Online Identity Verification System Used by Clients Needing Basic Consumer Verification.

This particular product and a number of similar products are popular among Fiat/Bitcoin interfaces like CoinBase which as a habit and manner of doing business refrain from showing their customers the slightest bit of respect towards their privacy or autonomy.

The system which enables this fraud shows no signs of stopping or changing in any appreciable manner making the pain likely to continue for residents of the United States and concerns seeking to do business there. In the United States theft by the fraudulent filing of other people's tax returns is by no means a new phenomenon, but a major national tax preparer having to take the step TurboTax did of totally ceasing to process state tax returns is unprecedented. It is also endemic of the deep sickness within United States commercial and legal culture arising from confusion over the difference between a signature and meta data.

From an earlier Qntra article on TurboTax's cessation of processing state tax returns.