EQUIFAX DATA BREACH Part 2

Hello again, Lynn Spencer here. I have bad news to share AGAIN with you all this week. Because of the Equifax Data Breach earlier this year, the IRS stated this week that the individual IP PIN numbers will be discontinued immediately. What this means is that their experiment to add an additional layer of security protection did not work as intended.

Many people do not realize that tax preparation professionals have more information on their clients than do other professionals such as your physician or attorney. Just like you, we hear all of the terrible news concerning hackers and data breaches nearly every day now. It does seem impossible to safeguard against determined identity thieves. And while that may be true I want to know that behind payroll, IT and Security of our clients financial information is our largest financial expenditure each month! We use Terry Gilbreath of Personal Systems Services, Inc. as our IT professional. He monitors our Servers and email accounts continuously for Phishing threats. He continues to teach us how to protect our data and the information of our clients. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal all the ways we do our best to protect your information, but rest assured we are doing everything we can to keep our client’s data protected.

We will soon be letting you all know of a new encrypted email service platform we are going to that many of the largest CPA and law firms in the United States use when sending sensitive information back and forth to clients. Yes, I know it’s somewhat of a pain, but this is the age we all live in today.