, Washington Post 2002-08-16
The Internal Revenue Service has lost to thieves or has misplaced another batch of computers, adding to the thousands already missing from that and other government agencies.
An audit released yesterday by the Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS cannot account for an unknown number of the 6,600 laptop and desktop computers it lends to volunteers who assist low-income, disabled and senior citizen taxpayers in preparing their returns.
Earlier audits found that the Customs Service couldn't account for about 2,000 computers and the Justice Department for about 400. Earlier this summer, the inspector general reported that about 2,300 computers were unaccounted for in other areas of the IRS.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, said senior government officials have to work out better ways for keeping track of computers.
"I'm worried that just as clothes dryers have the knack of making socks disappear, the federal government has discovered a core competency of losing computers," Grassley said in a letter to Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The latest report found computers missing from the IRS's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE) programs, which offer taxpayers who receive assistance the option of filing their returns electronically, the Treasury audit said. During the 2001 filing season, volunteers prepared approximately 1.1 million tax returns and e-filed more than 700,000, or 64 percent, it said.
The report concluded that "the IRS does not have adequate internal controls" over the computers it provides to the VITA and TCE programs. The agency cannot physically account for computers provided to volunteers, nor can it ensure that taxpayers' electronic data were removed from volunteer computers at the end of the filing season.
The inspector general has made recommendations to solve the problem, including seeking legislation that would allow the IRS simply to donate computers to organizations that provide these kinds of taxpayer assistance. Such transfer of ownership is currently prohibited by law.
The IRS said it agreed with most of the recommendations and was implementing new procedures to deal with the problems. It noted that any information contained on the missing computers would have been supplied by taxpayers for preparation of their returns; it would not have come from central IRS files or computers.
"We've been working for some time to improve our internal controls over computers we provide to volunteers," an IRS spokeswoman said. "We are going to continue to work to put in place appropriate procedures so we can continue to assist the volunteers who help elderly and low-income taxpayers across the country."
