A tax attorney was misled by the IRS when initiating a rollover for his IRA. Tax court ruled in favor of the IRS which resulted in penalties for the tax attorney. Andrew Williams invites readers to partake in this cautionary tale and explores other methods to protect your assets.

Service providers for 401(k) and other retirement plans require access to personal data on participants including name, age, address, date of hire, compensation and possibly social security number. This data is necessary to allow plan administrators and recordkeepers to properly allocate plan contributions and earnings to individual participant accounts, to prepare participant statements and for income tax reporting purposes.