Canada Tax Agency Snooping Revealed

Workers at Canada’s national tax agency peeped at the private records of family members, former spouses and creditors, an internal investigation shows.

The Toronto Star also reported that tax records were given to third parties, and that one tax office had 13 employees who were actively engaged in snooping. The heavily censored internal report, obtained by the Canadian Press news agency under the Access to Information Act, showed that dozens of workers made unauthorized forays into records to get better tax treatment for family members and business associates or to look at tax information of former spouses.

Secure Computing magazine said the report showed 29 cases of unauthorized access in 2008-2009 alone. Agency spokesman Noel Carisse did not disclose how the agency handled the instances of unauthorized access, but said the report’s conclusions “will almost always lead to the conclusion that injury to the taxpayer is likely, or has already occurred.”

In one particularly glaring example, an agency employee copied as many as 37,500 emails and 776 documents containing confidential financial information onto 17 compact discs for her own use, the report said.