Private Tax Information Leaked

We knew it was bad, but not this bad.

Thanks to the Access to Information Act, the Canadian Press reported that 2,700 personal tax files were downloaded on a private computer that subsequently disappeared. An auditor in a Toronto Canada Revenue Agency office apparently allowed a friend of hers to copy 16 CDs worth of private, unencrypted tax information onto his laptop back in 2006. Stranger still, this error wasn’t even discovered until the auditor presented the CDs in an unrelated grievance hearing where she accused the CRA of not accommodating her health conditions. The nearly 3,000 confidential taxpayer facts uncovered were located on just one of the disks, with more suspected to be located on the other 15. The CDs have been recovered, but the laptop is still nowhere to be found.