Jacksonville Congressman Darin LaHood took time on Friday to question IRS Commissioner John Koskinen regarding what’s being done to protect sensitive information of American taxpayers from mounting cybersecurity threats.
According to information from LaHood’s office, the personal information of over 700-thousand taxpayers were breached from 2014 to 2015. Last month, the Government Accountability Office released a report providing 43 recommendations for the IRS to increase security.
Here’s audio of LaHood and Koskinen during yesterday’s hearing:
“What are the successes that you’ve had in fixing this problem? When we tell the American people that we’ve had successes, we’re fixing this, we’re giving you confidence that we’re on the right track after we’ve had these series of events, statistics out there and these breaches, what are the successes?” asked LaHood.
“Successes are, first of all, and I’m always knocking on wood, our basic system has not been breached. We are attacked over a million times a day,” responded Koskinen.
Lahood: “Since when? When is the date you use on that?”
Koskinen: “Forever. We have not had a breach of our database directly. We’ve had breaches by people masquerading as taxpayers in applications, but the basic database of the IRS has had no significant breach that I know of, ever.”
You can watch the full exchange below: