A just-released congressional report, tax preparation sites have been sharing personal information – including adjusted gross income, the size of their tax refunds and even which buttons they clicked when filling out forms – with Google and Facebook.
CNN reported that according to the congressional investigation led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, TaxSlayer, H&R Block and TaxAct used visitor tracking technology embedded on their websites to allegedly send information from tens of millions of Americans.
The information was sent without consent or appropriate disclosures, according to the report. The information was allegedly shared going back as far as 2011.
On Tuesday, Warren and six other congressmen wrote to the Justice Department urging criminal charges be filed against the companies for violating laws that prevent tax preparers from sharing clients’ personal information.
According to the report, taxpayers who used TaxAct’s IRS Free File service would have had their information shared with the tech companies, as well, if tracker information was enabled.
According to The Washington Post, some tax-preparation companies do not even know if the data shared would still be held by the tech companies.
“On a scale from one to 10, this is a 15,” David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former consumer protection chief at the Federal Trade Commission, told CNN. The Federal Trade Commission is a top privacy watchdog.
“This is as great as any privacy breach that I’ve seen other than exploiting kids. This is a five-alarm fire, if what we know about this so far is true.”
Meta, in an emailed statement to the Post, said the fault lies with the tax-prep companies.
“We’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business tools.
“Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”
According to the Post, H&R Block said its website filed 8.4 million returns in the most recent tax filing season. Tax prep company Column Tax found that TaxSlayer filed 1.5 million returns and TaxAct filed 3 million returns for customers in 2022, the Post reported.