protectmyid.com/scdor website is back up

Welcome to Tax On Wheels, LLC

Please visit our blog to read the latest information on the South Carolina Department of Revenue security breach

If you are trying to reach the website to sign up for the free year of credit monitoring due to the South Carolina Department of Revenue security breach click here.

The website offered by the state of South Carolina Department of Revenue for tax filers who may be potential victims of identity theft is back up and online as of Sunday night. You may click through to www.protectmyid.com/scdor.   The code needed to access the website is widely being reported by the media as  “SCDOR123”.

It is also being reported that authorities will hold a press conference Monday morning October 29, 2012.  Hopefully, this event will provide more specific information on what is at stake and how tax payers can better protect themselves.

We continue to recommend to our clients that you not take any action related to this incident until the dust settles.  This problem will persist for months if not years and we see no advantage to being first in line to take advantage of the limited resources that are being provided at this time.

As always, you should be vigilant about protecting your credit and other financial matters.  We have provided some generic tools to use in protecting your finances in our newsletter, TaxTips.  You may click here to download a PDF version of the latest TaxTips newsletter.

The problem, as we see it, is that criminals will still have access to our social security numbers long after the one year of free credit monitoring has expired.  And the question becomes, what then?  Right now that question has not been addressed.

I suspect that this is a large enough breach of security that, at least in South Carolina, we may begin to implement laws which provide consumers with the ability to control their own credit profiles, rather than allowing that information to be at the mercy of profit making ventures which do not exercise sufficient care and diligence to eliminate this type of threat .  Perhaps we will discuss this in more detail later.

For right now the watch phrase seems to be hurry up and wait.  So let’s see what they have to say Monday.

As always, please feel free to contact Tax On Wheels, LLC at 803 732-4288 if you have questions or concerns.