@ lasma-
Same here, my company switched to Anthem and right after, the breach happened. So far, it looks like my data wasn’t hit, but I had to go through freezing my credit agency accounts, and enroll in credit protection and so forth. And what penalty has anthem faced? My company still uses them for our health insurance, and though we will never know the truth of what happened (the head of Anthem claimed it was ‘sophisticated hacking’, I would bet it was something stupid, like they hired contractors to work on their system, and they left open portals into the system administration from ordinary user accounts, that is what happened with Chase). I am not saying the IRS are wonderful, long before the current budget cuts the IRS was unpleasant to deal with, its employees often the stereotypical public employee (nasty to everyone, not caring) and their tactics basically are you are guilty until proven innocent, recently NPR had something about another IRS special, where they send a notice you owe money with a due date a day or two from when they send it, then the next day send a message telling you you didn’t respond, and they are taking action. However, they are no more stupid then Anthem or JP Morgan or Target or other people who have systems where user information, like SS#s, is human readable, where low level clerks have access to people’s confidential information (and often sell it), and so forth, big institutions in general don’t care. I loved the guy that was head of Anthem saying “we share your pain” because their own records were affected, doesn’t make me sleep any better at night.
I would make sure and send the IRS a letter clarifying everything, as it seems that maybe someone there does not know. I think there is a way to call the IRS and talk to someone to verify that he is on the plan.
As much as I dislike the IRS, I did have a fairly positive experience with them. They sent me a letter saying we owed an additional 17-18K in taxes one year, because of a mortgage writeoff. After I calmed down from going ballistic, I realized that they were right, and I had made an error. Entered everything in turbotax and thought it was taken care of (the Timothy Geithner defense). But they had added my refinanced mortgages up to make it one massive mortgage, and disallowed much of the deduction. A pretty stupid mistake for them to make.
However, I wrote them a respectful letter (that was hard), that was clear and simple, stating my case. And then edited it to make it even more respectful and clearer. They agreed with me, and knocked the taxes owed down to a fraction of the original estimate. They could have come after me for the same error for years in a row, but they didn’t. I figure that they probably are overworked, believe it or not, going for the simple solution, and I just made it easy for them. And I didn’t make them angry!
Do you realize that your Medicare # is your social security with a dash letter after.
XXX-XX-XXXX-letter
So when your mail arrives from the social security office or the medicare office it is all there for the public to grab.