Statement from Randy Livingston regarding compromised tax data

To all Stanford University employees, On Monday, April 4, Stanford's Department of Public Safety and the Information Security Office issued an alert to the university community after receiving a small number of reports from employees of fraudulently filed tax returns. Tax fraud has become a rampant problem across the country, arising from widespread online financial scams and highly publicized cyber breaches that have occurred in recent years. As such, at the time of the university alert, it did not appear that the university was being specifically targeted. University officials began investigating immediately, and that investigation is ongoing. It now appears that the university, among other employers, was a target as a source of W-2 forms. As the investigation proceeded we determined that some Stanford employee W-2 forms were fraudulently ed from our third-party vendor. In total, the W-2s of approximately 3,500 current and former Stanford employees were ed through the vendor's system.