Officials at the Internal Revenue Service withheld excessive amounts of information in more than 11 percent of responses to Freedom of Information Act requests this year, according to the agency’s watchdog.
A report made public Thursday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration also discovered that the IRS accidentally disclosed personal information, such as bank account numbers or credit scores, in a small number of responses.
Among the 60 cases sampled by the tax watchdog, seven “included improperly withheld information related to the taxpayers’ own cases with the IRS.” Requesters in those instances received documents from the IRS on which their own bank statements and tax returns were redacted.
TIGTA estimated that more than 300 FOIA requests had been improperly handled in 2016. Overall, the IRS processed 2,720 open records requests this year.
But the backlog of requests piling up at the tax agency hit a third-year high, climbing to 367 by the end of September.
IRS officials blamed “budgetary constraints” for the backlog, as well as the “complexity” of the requests filed this year for records held by the agency.
