With Tax Day – April 15 – having arrived for 2013, now is a good time to review the top tips every taxpayer should know about identity theft offered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on the IRS Identity Protection Tips page available at http://www.irs.gov/uac/Identity-Protection-Tips. (more…)
On the day taxes are due for Americans, April 17, 2012, House Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced bipartisan legislation – The Stopping Tax Offenders and Prosecuting Identity Theft Act (H.R. 4362) – to help stop the growing problem of tax return identity theft and protect tax payers from identity thieves who file tax returns using names of other people to receive their tax refund checks. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), more than 850,000 tax returns and $5.8 billion were associated with tax return identify theft in 2011 alone. (more…)
As part of a stepped-up effort against tax refund fraud and identity theft, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Justice Department have announced that a massive nationwide sweep last week targeting 105 people in 23 states to crack down on suspected identity theft perpetrators resulted in 939 criminal charges related to identity theft, according to a news release on the IRS website available at: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=253147,00.html?portlet=108. (more…)
Designed to increase tax compliance and provide past payroll tax relief to employers, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has launched a new Voluntary Classification Settlement Program (VCSP) that will enable employers to resolve past worker classification issues and achieve certainty under the tax law at a low cost by voluntarily reclassifying their workers, according to a news release from the IRS website.
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report titled ‘TAXES AND IDENTITY THEFT – Status of IRS Initiatives to Help Victimized Taxpayers’ that reveals a huge jump in the number of tax-related identity theft incidents identified by Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Primarily refund or employment fraud attempts, the IRS identified 248,357 tax-related identity theft incidents in 2010, nearly five times the amount of such incidents reported in 2008. (more…)
