Is Your Accountant Sending Your Information Offshore?

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Is your accountant or tax preparer sending your personally identifiable information (PII) offshore? Possibly.

Here is the second part of the first article, "(Mis)Using Social Security Numbers in Business," within my August issue of IT Compliance in Realtime Journal, which discusses the use of SSNs (get the nicest version of the full journal here)...

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Sharing SSNs with Others

A big information security, privacy, and compliance issue within all organizations is information sharing. Certainly it is important to know with whom your organization shares SSNs. Too many organizations share far too much information about their employees and customers with third parties.

It is worth noting that on July 2, 2008, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) published proposed and combined final and temporary rules that allow U.S.-based tax preparers to share taxpayers' SSNs with offshore tax preparers if adequate data security safeguards are in place and if the taxpayer consents to having their information shared. The rules amend regulations issued in January that prohibited the sharing of SSNs with offshore tax preparation contractors, even if the taxpayer consented to the practice.

The proposed IRS regulations are available at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-15047.pdf. The final and temporary IRS regulations are available at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-15046.pdf.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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