The IRS inadvertently published information of about 120,000 people

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• The IRS "inadvertently" published some Form 990-T data.
• The IRS "removed the errant files," according to a letter to the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security.
• The issue impacts about 120,000 people, according to reporting from the Journal.

The IRS "inadvertently published" confidential information of about 120,000 people, the agency said Friday.

The data came from business tax return Form 990-T, the IRS said, adding that it "should not have been made public." 

"The IRS is required to publicly disclose this information for 501(c)(3) organizations; however, similar information was inadvertently published for a subset of non-501(c)(3)s, which are not subject to public disclosure," the agency said. 

Because this involves over 100,000 people, the issue is considered "a major incident" according to OMB's Guidance on Federal Information Security and Privacy Management Requirements as noted in a letter published by The Wall Street Journal.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the unintentionally published data, an employee of the IRS recently found the issue. The IRS has "removed the errant files" from the government site and will be replacing the files with updated ones in the coming weeks, according to the letter to lawmakers on September 2.

According to the Journal, this issue was because of a human coding error last year. That was when the Form 990-T tax return could be filed electronically, the publication added.

According to a letter reported by the Journal, the unintended published data didn't include some personal information, including Social Security numbers. The letter noted "individual income information, detailed financial account data, or other sensitive information that could impact a taxpayer's credit" wasn't included either.

However, it did include some people's names and contact information of businesses, per the statement from the IRS site and the letter.

The IRS said they would contact those impacted "in the coming weeks" per the IRS statement.