A Nebraska woman, while attempting to bring up previous tax returns through the Turbo Tax web site, found that she (and others) could access returns of other people with the same last name and first initial. The exposed data included the Social Security Numbers and back account routing numbers for three other people.

Turbo Tax has taken down the link that led to the data exposure and is further investigating the issue. This problem seems to be limited to only the online version of Turbo Tax.

“It’s clear that she was able to access information that she shouldn’t have been able to,” said Gordon Whitten of Turbo Tax.

An Omaha-based official with the Turbo Tax parent company said the inadvertent access to some tax files came as a shock.

“We think it was a quirk, an individual circumstance as far as we know,” Whitten said. “So what we did is we took that link down in the product for now until we can fully investigate to make sure the issue won’t happen again to anybody else.”

However, calling this just “a quirk” is a bit of a stretch. Either something is programmed securely or it’s not. Private data shouldn’t be just appearing on people’s screens and if it is, boy they shouldn’t be trusted at all!

I wouldn’t rush to use any Turbo Tax product this year. There is just no excuse for allowing access to private data this easily and I think this could be indicative of a larger problem of not taking security and their user’s privacy seriously.

[Glitch Gives Woman Access To Others' Turbo Tax Information]

[tags]Turbo Tax, online tax returns, taxes, tax, IRS[/tags]