Protect Your Clients, Protect Yourself
The IRS and Security Summit partners have developed the following "Tip Sheet" for tax professionals, businesses, taxpayers
Earlier this year the Security Summit’s Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself campaign encouraged tax professionals to focus on fundamentals and to watch out for emerging vulnerabilities being seen for those practitioners using cloud-based services for their practice. Scammers either trick or hack their way into tax professionals’ computer systems to access client data. Even when tax pros think they have client data stored in a secure cloud, lack of strong authentication can make this information vulnerable.
Additional safeguards for businesses, tax professionals and taxpayers to protect themselves from potential identity theft include:
- Use separate personal and business computers, mobile devices and email accounts.
- Do not send sensitive business information to personal email devices.
- Do not conduct business, including online business banking, on a personal computer or device.
- Do not engage in web surfing, gaming or video downloading on business computers or devices.
- Do not share USB drives or external hard drives between personal and business computers or devices.
- Never connect an unknown/untrusted piece of hardware into the system or network.
- Change passwords often, every three months is recommended.
- Consider using a password management application to store passwords.
- Do not reuse passwords on devices and applications that contain business information.