Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, “Due to inaction by the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Congress, Public.Resource.Org has been forced to terminate access to 7,634,050 filings of nonprofit organizations. The problem is that we have been fixing the database, providing better access mechanisms and finding and redacting huge numbers of Social Security Numbers. Our peers such as GuideStar are also fixing their copies of the database.”
But, the IRS keeps selling the tainted data and keeps selling the public feed and distributing it in one of the most brain-dead ways we’ve ever seen.
While the IRS and Congress have ignored months and months of detailed audit results we’ve sent them involving hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren and community volunteers, when it came to the privacy information of a few dozen political operatives, they sprang into action. That is outrageous and we can no longer condone such blatant violation of the law by the IRS and the the U.S. Congress.
You can read our termination notice and a letter to Commissioner Koskinen and Chairman Issa protesting their inaction and indifference.
I have prepared 3,684 pages of detailed documentation of privacy breaches for the 9 states with the worst problems. Any congressional staff from California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Texas who contact me from an official account will be sent a pointer to the Book of Names for their state containing the actual pages from Form 990s with the names, addresses, and Social Security Numbers of their constituents.
(Thanks, Carl!)
(Image: IRS, Lending Memo, CC-BY)