Don't Mess With Taxes

Television offers a wonderful view of modern superwomen. They're young, brash, tech-savvy and just what we need off screen nowadays to fight the ever-growing crime of identity theft.

Real-life versions of popular TV characters Penelope, Claudia and Abby could be the answer to continuing hacks of federal government websites.

There's Penelope Garcia, the hacker transformed into FBI computer wiz, on CBS' Criminal Minds; Claudia Donovan, the computer hacker who shook things up for the better on Syfy's Warehouse 13; and Abby Sciuto, whose many detecting talents on CBS' NCIS include digital forensics. 

All these female characters are young, offbeat and regularly get their older, more by-the-book crime-fighting colleagues out of trouble with their technological talents and outside the book -- heck, outside the library -- thinking.

They are just three of the prototypical tech experts on TV nowadays.

And Uncle Sam needs to find some real-life versions of these fictional characters ASAP if he's ever going to be able to deal with the growing rash of hackers.

Fight hackers with computer wizards: That's the suggestion made today by Washington Post Federal Eye columnist Joe Davidson. He writes that the federal government needs to step up recruitment of cyber talent and quickly.

The Government Accountability Office's 2015 high risk list notes that there is a critical skills gap in the U.S. technology infrastructure when it comes to cyber security, notes Davidson. He also points to the recent Office of Personnel Management hack, of which I am, yikes!, a victim.

I suspect Davidson will be updating his column to reflect the latest disturbing cyber insecurity news from the Internal Revenue Service.

IRS hack worse than first thought: The federal tax collector announced today that it had greatly underestimated the number of tax accounts that were breached when hackers got into its Get Transcript online app.

Instead of tax return data of 114,000 taxpayers being accessed by suspected Russian identity thieves, it now appears the number is closer to 334,000 hacked accounts.

Yikes redux.

Here's hoping that life can imitate art and Uncle Sam can find some Penelopes, Abbys and Claudias to sic on these cyber criminals ASAP.

You also might find these items of interest:

• Latest tax scam arrives as fake snail-mailed IRS letters
• IRS working with tax industry, states to upgrade security
• Most CPAs report having clients who were tax ID theft victims