On December 31, 2015, the Regional Income Tax Agency of Ohio (RITA) issued a news release indicating that an internal investigation determined that personal information supplied by individuals to RITA on or before June 2012 may be at risk due to a missing DVD. RITA is in the process of contacting potentially affected individuals by regular mail and is offering free credit monitoring and identity protection for a period of time.

RITA provides tax administration, collection and enforcement services to over 250 Ohio municipalities. Each member municipal corporation ultimately retains its rights to administer and enforce its own taxes. Currently more than 550 Ohio municipalities impose income tax.

According to the news release, during November 2015 RITA was preparing a limited number of DVDs for secured destruction and discovered one of the DVDs was missing. RITA determined that the missing DVD contained back-up copies of income tax documents submitted to RITA on or before June 2012. These documents may have included taxpayer's names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other identifying information and, possibly, financial information if submitted with the income tax documents. RITA believes that this DVD may have been destroyed pursuant to its policy regarding unlabeled DVDs, but is unable to definitively confirm that fact. It appears that up to 50,000 individuals may have had their information on this missing DVD, which is less than 2% of the total tax accounts handled by RITA.

RITA has recently changed its back-up storage process to a more secure system that does not involve using DVDs. As noted above, RITA is in the process of issuing written notifications to affected individuals via regular mail and offering them one year of credit monitoring and identify protection services free of charge through Experian. RITA's contact number for this purpose is (866) 940-3613.

Implications

Individuals who are contacted by RITA in writing should consider taking advantage of the offer of credit reporting and identity protection services described earlier. Remember that the contact from RITA will be in writing via regular mail. Any emails, texts or phone calls purporting to be from RITA should be received with extreme caution as these could be phishing attacks designed to obtain personal information for illegal purposes.

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