This newfound interest from IRS in privacy and identity-theft prevention always reminds me of a seminar I attended, back around 1996, when I asked Commissioner Richardson when IRS would deliver its long-promised PTIN program so we would not have to put our SSN’s on every return we prepared.

She didn’t know what I was talking about. It would be three more years before PTIN’s were permitted.

Some of my clients have been with me since the 80s and 90s, and some of them save their returns forever. (If they ask, I tell them to throw out the receipts but keep the returns, because they don’t take up much room and on occasion they are needed for non-tax matters.) I worry about what happens with those returns when they’re gone. But it’s not just my problem. There are hundreds of thousands of practitioners, of a certain age, with their SSN’s filed away and ready to be discovered.