Does anyone have corroboration? I mean, Cringely has a history of overstating his claims, and this story is very thinly sourced. The only evidence that Cringely presents is the one Wall Street Journal article that is, by his own admission, inadequate to support his claims.
Further, he presents the existence of Form 14039 as further evidence of massive tax fraud without any indication that correlation in this case is due to causation. I mean, on the basis of this article alone, I have no reason to conclude that the IRS introduced this form for the purposes of addressing or covering up this fraud. In fact, a much more likely scenario is that identity theft is now so common, the IRS has formalized its procedures for dealing with it by creating a new tax form. Finally, I don't see any of the "draconian policy changes" that he's referring to on the horizon.
This entire article just strikes me as somehow... wrong. There are just too many conclusions being drawn off one piece of very weak evidence for me to give it any credence.
Since the site is dead, here's the text from my RSS Reader:
The $30 billion Social Security hack
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Sometime last year computers at the U.S. Social Security Administration were hacked and the identities of millions of Americans were compromised. What, you didn’t hear about that? Nobody did.
The extent of damage is only just now coming to light in the form of millions of false 2011 income tax returns filed in the names of people currently receiving Social Security benefits. That includes a very large number of elderly and disabled people who are ill-equipped to recognize or fight the problem. It’s an impact pervasive enough that the IRS now has a form just to deal with it: Form 14039: Identity Theft Affidavit, December 2011.
The Wall $treet Journal has a story about this problem specific to Puerto Rico, but the Journal fails to mention that this is a national problem — a $30+ billion problem.
The story is going public now because tax season is upon us and there’s no way to keep it under wraps as people file their tax returns only to learn that a return under that name has already been filed with refunds paid electronically into a bank account now closed. The December date on that IRS Form 14039 shows the Treasury has been expecting this for awhile.
The question being asked about this in Washington, DC today is whether this hack was an act of war? More likely an act of Tony Soprano, I’d say. If the goal of war is to sow confusion and discontent, then okay, maybe China or Iran are behind this (you don’t have to be a superpower to take on the U.S. government anymore). But the more probable goal is simply to steal money and that’s a domestic job.
Either way, that big hacker score guys like me have been predicting for several years has finally happened with draconian policy changes sure to follow. Lucky us.
To me it's the plausibility that matters
even if this is not real ( the fraud is clearly real and probably not rare, the scale is the thing at issue)
even if it's not real, there is little to suppose it cannot be real. Social security numbers are / used to be a simplettransposition of date of birth iirr
it's how do we prevent such frauds - and if we do it's still a clever dos attack on the IRS. 10 million fraudulent tax returns. How do you deal with that except manual review?
Further, he presents the existence of Form 14039 as further evidence of massive tax fraud without any indication that correlation in this case is due to causation. I mean, on the basis of this article alone, I have no reason to conclude that the IRS introduced this form for the purposes of addressing or covering up this fraud. In fact, a much more likely scenario is that identity theft is now so common, the IRS has formalized its procedures for dealing with it by creating a new tax form. Finally, I don't see any of the "draconian policy changes" that he's referring to on the horizon.
This entire article just strikes me as somehow... wrong. There are just too many conclusions being drawn off one piece of very weak evidence for me to give it any credence.