A number of Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) employees shared private taxpayer information last year in a Facebook Messenger chat group that was not approved for use by the agency, according to newly released federal records.
Cabinet in an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons on March 27 said the CRA employees used the chat group to have “a private conversation mentioning taxpayer information” between May and June 2022 before one of the group’s administrators deleted it on June 7.
“Affected taxpayers were notified and were offered credit protection services, as well as additional actions they could take to prevent fraud and contact the CRA if they found it to be necessary,” the agency said.
Details of the incident were tabled in response to an order paper question filed by Conservative MP Dean Allison, who asked in February how many requests the federal government has made to social media companies since 2020 to remove or edit online posts on respective platforms.
According to the Inquiry, the CRA requested that Facebook delete the conversation containing private taxpayer information from its servers, but could not confirm whether or not the social media giant complied with the request.
“CRA [was] not privy to Facebook resolution,” it said.
CRA did not disclose how many employees were involved, the number of taxpayers whose confidential information was compromised, nor what kind of information the employees were using the chat group to discuss.
The federal agency added that it disciplined all the employees involved in the incident using measures “up to, and including, termination of employment,” and also said that CRA employees were “retrained on Unauthorized Access and Social Media.”
Other Departments
In the same Inquiry, other federal departments and agencies also provided information on how many times they have interacted with social media companies over the past three years to request online content be taken down.The requests were often made to have impersonating accounts removed from platforms, but there were also requests to delete posts deemed offensive.
In particular, the Public Health Agency of Canada made 21 requests to Twitter since December 2020 to remove content it deemed to contain “offensive language.” However, Twitter only took action in response on three occasions.
Health Canada also made a number of requests to Facebook to have certain posts removed.
The Inquiry says that the federal agency’s Chief of Social Media requested in February 2021 for three posts containing “disinformation about lifting of COVID-19 restriction” to be removed from the platform.
The Inquiry says Facebook complied with all three requests.
