A lot of people are very upset with Equifax at the moment. The company’s amateur hour security practices allow the personal information of millions of people to fall into unauthorized hands. You would think that a screw up of that magnitude would dissuade any rational business from doing business with it. Well the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) isn’t rational or a business so this shouldn’t surprise anybody:
Between March and July of this year, the credit rating agency Equifax, was infiltrated by hackers who made off with the sensitive personal information of more than 140 million Americans. That sounds like the kind of thing that might hurt a company’s credibility when it comes to security. But Politico is now reporting that the IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to “verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud.”
I don’t know why the IRS feels the need to pay Equifax to verify taxpayer identities when its database is in the wild. I’m sure the IRS could acquire a copy and just perform verify taxpayers itself.
I really need to get into government contracts. It seems like no screw up is so severe that it will dissuade the government from doing business with you.