An Iowa senator is concerned about the government’s habit of losing laptop computers, according to a recent News.com article penned by Margaret Kane. Republican senator Chuck Grassley said, “I’m worried that just as clothes dryers have the knack of making socks disappear, the federal government has discovered a core competency of losing computers.”
Apparently about 2,000 laptops have gone missing from the Internal Revenue Service in the last year. The laptops were used by volunteers in a tax-assistance program last year and cannot be accounted for. What’s even worse is that they may still have taxpayer information on them, according to a recent government audit.
That’s not all — even the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service and the DEA can’t keep track of their laptops. The Justice Department said that nearly 400 laptops assigned to those agencies have either been stolen or lost, and that some of them may even have “national security or sensitive law enforcement information” on them.