The feds snoop on themselves sometimes, too. The Treasury Department decided to take peek into IRS employees' e-mail inboxes lately to see what was in them. Lo and behold:
IRS employees are violating provisions of the personal use policy with their email usage. Specifically, we found inappropriate email messages in 74% of the employee mailboxes reviewed. These inappropriate email messages contained chain letters, jokes, offensive content, and sexually explicit content.On a more important note, however, the inspectors found that the IRS's e-mail servers are sitting ducks for hackers:
To evaluate the security over email servers, we selected a judgmental sample of 28 email servers and found 687 security vulnerabilities on all 28 servers. People can exploit security vulnerabilities to shut down the servers and disrupt email service or to use the servers to access or attack other computers in the network, which could disrupt other critical operations in the IRS.Read the whole thing here. (Via TaxProf Blog.)
The *IN* box? How much control are IRS employees supposed to have over that?
Posted by: Allan L. at August 10, 2006 01:40 PMWhen I worked at US Bank, ALL of our email was carbon copied to a direct supervisor and/or auditor for review.
ONE unauthorized email = loss of job. period.
Maybe the IRS should adopt a similar policy.
Posted by: Anthony at August 10, 2006 02:10 PM