Taxpayer ID theft on rise, GAO says

Taxpayer ID theft on rise, GAO says

WASHINGTON

Imagine filing your tax return and learning that someone else got your refund. With your name and Social Security number, no less.

The IRS is grappling with a nearly five-fold increase in taxpayer identity theft between 2008 and 2010, a Government Accountability Office official plans to tell a House hearing today. There were 248,357 incidents in 2010, compared with 51,702 in 2008.

The GAO findings, obtained by The Associated Press, don’t begin to describe the pain for a first-time victim, who must wait for a refund while the IRS sorts out which return is real and which is a fraud.

Many identity thieves don’t get prosecuted, according James White, director of strategic issues for the GAO..

Ex-Google CEO: ‘I screwed up’

SAN FRANCISCO

If he had a another chance, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would have pressed the Internet search leader to focus more on mounting a challenge to Facebook while he was still running the company.

“I screwed up,” Schmidt said late Tuesday during a 75-minute question-and-answer session at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. The Associated Press watched a webcast of the conference.

Schmidt’s admission comes nearly two months after he ended his decade-long stint as Google’s CEO and became the company’s executive chairman. He was replaced by Google co-founder Larry Page, who is pushing the company’s employees to develop more ways to connect people with their friends and family as Facebook already does.

Hackers in China break into Gmail

SAN FRANCISCO

Google Inc. is blaming computer hackers in China for a high-tech ruse that broke into the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists.

The breach announced Wednesday marks the second time in 17 months that Google has publicly identified China as the home base for a scheme aimed at hijacking information stored on Google’s vast network of computers.

This round of attacks isn’t believed to be tied to a more-sophisticated assault originating from China in late 2009 and early last year. That intrusion went after some of Google’s trade secrets and triggered a high-profile battle with China’s Communist government over online censorship that has made it more difficult for the company to do business in the world’s most-populous country.

Associated Press