OTTAWA - The Canada Revenue Agency says eight of its employees were fired in the last fiscal year after violating taxpayers' privacy.
Previously, the agency has not always confirmed if an employee was fired or shuffled out of the CRA for being part of a privacy breach, often citing the employee's privacy.
A spokesman for the agency says the employees in each case were found to have had unauthorized access to taxpayer information, including one incident that the CRA calls the largest such breach in the agency's history.
In that case, one employee improperly accessed the accounts of 1,264 taxpayers.
All of the firings took place between April 2016 and March 2017, the federal government's fiscal year.
All of the incidents were also reported to the federal privacy commissioner as required on federal government policy because they involve sensitive personal information that could be used to cause “serious injury or harm” to the individual, or involved a large number of affected individuals.
