What happens if IRS loses our data?

Could the loss of data from the huge Internal Revenue Service master files cause a financial meltdown in this country? That's what some experts are pondering as the U.K. mops up the mess left in the wake of the disappearance of two password-protected CDs containing the country's entire database of child benefit recipients - 25 million people. A loss of that scale could have taken place within the IRS, "and we don't know about it," says Gartner Inc. analyst and longtime World Bank executive Avivah Litan. Over the last several years, potentially hundreds of laptops containing sensitive information have disappeared at the IRS, according to an audit reported earlier this year by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

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