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The mission of the Office of Safeguards is to promote taxpayer confidence in the integrity of the tax system by ensuring the confidentiality of IRS information provided to federal, state, and local agencies. Safeguards verifies compliance with IRC 6103(p)(4) safeguard requirements through the identification and mitigation of any risk of loss, breach, or misuse of Federal Tax Information held by external government agencies.
Publication 1075, Tax Information Security Guidelines for Federal, State and Local Agencies PDF (Rev. 11-2021) provides guidance to ensure the policies, practices, controls, and safeguards employed by recipient agencies, agents, or contractors adequately protect the confidentiality of FTI.
Technical assistance by topic
Environments
- Cloud computing
- Integrated Eligibility Systems (IES)
- Integrated Voice Response (IVR) systems
- Mobile device
- Virtual desktop
- Web portals
- Wireless network
- Live data testing
Networking guidance
- Network defense-in-depth
- Social media sites and collaboration tools
- Databases through labeling
- Proactive auditing
- Warning banner must be used when housing federal tax information
Physical security
- Background investigations
- Child support resources
- Printed notices in ACA
- Internal inspections
- Agency Internal Audits
- 45 day notifications
- Publication 4761 guide PDF
Configuration
- Computer virus technical assistance
- Configuration and patch management planning
- Encryption requirements of IRS publication 1075
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems
- Use of collaborative computing environments
- Use of Federal Tax Information (FTI) in open source software
- Safeguards technical assistance virus scanning tools
Policies and procedures
- Media sanitization guidelines
- Multi-factor authentication implementation
- Operational security policies and procedures
- Management Operational and Technical policies (MOT)
- Preventing data leakage
- Sample authority to operate memorandum
- Safeguards technical assistance policy and procedures involving a contractor