THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: IRS’ estimate of tax records stolen by fraudsters soars to over 300,000. “More than three months after the Internal Revenue Service shut down its online tax transcript service because of a massive identity theft effort, the IRS is now acknowledging that the number of affected taxpayers is more than three times the agency’s initial estimate. And the number of affected taxpayers may continue to grow as the agency digs into logs of hundreds of thousands of connections to its Get Transcript application over the past year. Today, the agency announced that there were, in total, more than 600,000 suspicious attempts made to create user accounts on the transcript system using what appears to be stolen personal identifying information from recent credit card breaches and other corporate hacks; more than 300,000 of those attempts succeeded.”