IRS Office by Alpha Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

IRS systems are still vulnerable to the same tricks used by the thief to commit the crime, as discovered by a 2024 security audit conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

On Tuesday Feb. 25 the IRS confirmed in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan that the IRS thief — Charles Littlejohn — stole and disclosed the files of at least 405,427 taxpayers.

[See Also: IRS to Gain Access to Driver License Scans of Millions of Small Business Owners]

The number keeps growing. The IRS previously told congress it was “thousands” and then later said “tens of thousands.” Now we know it is hundreds of thousands.

And yet the Biden DOJ only charged the thief with ONE count of theft, a fact that left even the Biden-appointed judge aghast: “I have no words,” the judge said in court.

Did you know: When stealing the files, the thief worked for IRS contractor Booz Allen. Somehow, the Biden IRS in 2023 awarded that firm yet another enormous contract.

Did you know: IRS systems are still vulnerable to the same tricks the thief used to commit the crime, as discovered by a 2024 security audit conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Did you know: TIGTA in 2024 also found that 919 people had full unmasked access to private taxpayer data. Including 20 “researchers and student volunteers.”

Yikes. The beltway press corps has certainly proved itself incurious on these questions.

The Feb. 25 IRS letter detailing the quantity of theft victims was the result of Congressman Jordan’s persistent oversight and investigations of the IRS over the past several years.

Jordan’s work also led the IRS to stop their practice of “unannounced surprise visits” by IRS agents to taxpayers’ homes.

The heist was the largest in IRS history.

The thief admitted he sought a job with access to sensitive IRS systems with the full intention of stealing private files.

The overall “vast trove” of stolen files contains many years of tax returns, tax audits, details of stock trades, gambling losses, and medical expense deductions.

Victims include thousands of non-famous Americans as well as famous Americans: Lebron James, Tiger Woods, Lorne Michaels, Calvin Klein, Floyd Mayweather, Justin Verlander, the GOAT Michael Jordan and hundreds of thousands of everyday taxpayers.

More Americans are learning they are a victim of the theft, and they have no idea when their private information will be published against their will.

Note: Despite the media hype, the thief was NOT formally charged with stealing Donald Trump’s tax returns, because the statute of limitations had already been reached on that particular theft.

The thief got off easy: Only five years incarceration for committing at least 405,427 felonies. That amounts to less than seven minutes in jail per felony.

The theft was revealed on June 8, 2021 – coincidentally at the very moment Democrats launched a major tax-increase effort.

And yet from the very beginning, the IRS stonewalled and even tried to pretend that IRS systems were not the source of the stolen files.

The IRS talks a big game that they can quickly detect data theft. The evidence says otherwise.

Why did the IRS supposedly not know for two years that agency systems were the source of the theft?

A timeline of Yellen and Rettig statements on the theft can be found below, and a video compilation of these statements can be found here.

June 8, 2021: Charles Rettig, IRS Commissioner: “I can confirm that there is an investigation with respect to the allegations that the source of the information in that article came from the Internal Revenue Service.”

June 16, 2021: Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary: “And I really want to emphasize we do not know what happened”

June 23, 2021: Yellen: “We don’t yet know what occurred.”

Sept. 28, 2021: Yellen: “Just to be clear, we do not know that the ProPublica information came from the IRS.”

Nov. 30, 2021: Yellen: “We don’t know what the source of the leak of that information was.”

Apr. 7, 2022: Rettig: “I don’t believe it’s been indicated that it was actually stolen from the IRS.” “I get frustrated when investigations go on without public acknowledgement of what’s there. You know the timing isn’t helpful for maybe an agency to say what did or didn’t happen.”

April 2022: Rettig: “And I don’t believe there has been a public statement that it actually was a leak or a breach from the Internal Revenue Service where that data came from.”

May 10, 2022: Yellen: “I really am anxious to see some results here as well. I regret that I’m not able to do so.”

March 10, 2023: Yellen: “I would really like to get to the bottom of this. We care deeply about taxpayer privacy and an unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information is illegal and something to be taken very seriously.”

March 22, 2023: Yellen: “I’m afraid that I know no more about this than I did when the leak first occurred.”

The IRS did not publicly admit it was the source of the stolen files until September 29, 2023.

That is more than 800 days from the time the theft was publicly revealed to the time the IRS publicly acknowledged it was the source.

Since that time, the IRS has been repeatedly busted for sloppy security practices. The official watchdog of the IRS — the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — has published numerous audits revealing a reckless disregard for taxpayer privacy.

Most recently, TIGTA visited IRS offices around the country and discovered IRS agents cannot even be bothered to use the mandatory security bins for disposal of documents containing sensitive personal taxpayer information.