Wealth & Money Quote by Melissa Bean

Outsourcing is framed here less as an efficiency story than as a sovereignty problem: the moment sensitive tax data crosses a border, the United States loses not just oversight but leverage. Melissa Bean’s line is engineered to make a technical back-office practice feel visceral. “Reports also suggest” signals both caution and alarm, letting her amplify a concern without overcommitting to an evidentiary claim that could be politically contested. Then she pivots to the gut punch: “no control.” It’s absolute language, meant to collapse a complicated chain of contractors, privacy policies, and jurisdictional gray zones into a simple, unsettling fact.

The subtext is aimed squarely at the credibility gap between government responsibility and private-sector operations. Bean isn’t only warning about hackers or sloppy handling; she’s indicting a regulatory mismatch. The IRS is tasked with protecting taxpayer information, yet the market structure of tax preparation and processing can route data through foreign subcontractors beyond the IRS’s direct reach. That tension becomes the argument.

Context matters: this lands in an era when globalization and offshoring were increasingly normal for corporations, while public anxiety about identity theft and data breaches was rising fast. By naming “Ernst and Young and other large tax preparation firms,” she undercuts the comforting idea that outsourcing is something only fly-by-night operators do. The intent is to force a policy response - tighter disclosure rules, limits on offshore processing, or updated enforcement - by making “where your taxes go” sound like a national security question, not a spreadsheet optimization.