About
When I was 46 I started writing essays on life, or the state of the human condition as I once called it. Because I was halfway between old enough to vote (21) and planned retirement (72) it was known as the "Halfway Point" series of essays.

Later when I mentioned the essays in one context or another on USENET, I got requests for copies and eventually for future essays. Thus the mailing list was born, and it moved to the Internet when that became widely available. At that time I moved to writing on a schedule, the 1st, 11th, and 21st of the month.

Now the trend is to "blogs," and read on demand. I am therefore making this available as a blog, and we shall see if people read it here, or by mail, or not at all.

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Changing tax preparers - data security issues (16:09)

I had to change income tax preparers this year, our long time tax advisor is retiring, and it's something like changing doctors. You know you have to do it, it's not something you should do for yourself, but no matter what recommendations you get and how well certified and recommended the new "tax guy" is, you always have issues of trust. And like getting a new doctor, people with minor problems tend to think they should try to solve them without professional help. This is particularly true of taxes, people are tempted by the simplicity of the short form, the boasts of their friends who do their own (and occasionally offer to help with yours), the ads for tax software, and they feel that they can use their past returns as a guide to do it themselves and save. They tend to forget that the law may have changed in a year, and ignore the ads for Tax Masters and others similar services who specialize in helping those who have been negnigent, incompetent, or worse yet creative in their tax preparation.

In my case, perhaps more than usual, the feeling of trepidation was strong. The person we have been using has not only become a good personal friend, but she and her husband won a weekend getaway from the IRS, given annually to the preparer with the lowest error rate in the state. That is a very high standard to meet. This provided a feeling of being in good hands far more than a few recommendations and certificates on the wall. How could I ever find someone deserving of that same level of trust again?

Our tax preparers and advisors have always been competent although not always satisfactory, our first preparer was a man we called Jaba the Hut, because of a resemblance in both appearance and demeanor. He sat behind his desk in a gloomy basement office, treated us like idiots, told dirty jokes, sharpened his pencil after every field of the return, and responded to my questions with comments like "I explained that last year," and "only if you want to go to jail." In spite of that, he was thorough, found a number of things I missed doing a "test run" on my own to be sure I had the required information, and he impressed the hell out me one night by calling the District Director of Internal Revenue at home on a Sunday night, and getting a binding ruling on "involuntary liquidation" which saved us big money by turning regular income into capital gain. In spite of his good fiscal services, we were somewhat relieved when he passed away and we found a new CPA. Incidentally, the gruff manner didn't run in the family, his lawyer nephew did the incorporation of our first company, and was quite pleasant as well as competent.

So when we needed a new tax preparer, we did "due diligence" and got a clean bill of health on both competence and past performance. Because it was a tax service (local, not one of the national chains), I asked about things like information being taken home (no), preparers being qualified (yes), all unusual items checked by a CPA (yes), and good data security (about as good as Windows gets). So we felt reasonably secure, our return was given a once-over by our retiring friend, and the security felt pretty good.

Then I found this information. It seems that while the tax preparation is reasonably secure against hacking and casual physical access, once your tax information is submitted, the IRS fails to take even simple precautions which I would think are necessary on any business system, much less the extraordinary measures which I think should be used to protect the personal information of millions of people. When I was working for SBC, if an employee left the company for any reason, access codes for the appropriate computers and networks were changed then, day, night, or weekend, and new credentials were immediately distributed where they were needed by secure channels. On at least one occasion two of us waited until long after normal hours for the results of a meeting with an employee who had violated policy, so that if termination was appropriate 38 servers could be changed before the employee left the interview.

It's a sad commentary on the whole tax collection system, when the least secure guardian of our personal data is the one piece of the process you can't replace with a more competent alternative.