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The Internal Revenue Service mistakenly posted confidential information on its website last week, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Anna Canfield Roth, the acting assistant secretary for management in the Treasury Department, informed Congress of the mistake in a letter to several members of Congress, including Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
She explained that information from Form 990-T, which is used by tax-exempt entities, was posted online on Friday (August 26). The data included names and business contact information for about 120,000 people. However, the data did not include sensitive information such as social security numbers.
Roth said that the files were quickly removed from the website and that the agency is working to replace them with the correct files, which could take several weeks.
"The IRS took immediate steps to address this issue," the IRS said in a statement to Fox Business. "The files have been removed from IRS.gov and will be replaced with updated files in the near future. In addition, the IRS also will be working with groups that routinely use the files to remove the erroneous files and replace them with the correct versions as they become available."