IRS Notifying Taxpayers of Attempted Fraudulent Use of SSNs

IRS Notifying Taxpayers of Attempted Fraudulent Use of SSNs

The IRS announced in response to a TIGTA (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration) report that, starting in January 2017, they will begin notifying taxpayers of the potentially improper use of social security numbers that have been used in employment-related identity theft.  This fraudulent act is commonly executed by identity thieves who use their victims’ information to file false Forms W-2 with the Social Security Administration and the IRS.  This is done in order to match the falsely filed income tax return information with the falsely filed wage and withholding information reported on the W-2 in order to circumvent IRS computer systems from flagging the individual income tax returns as fraudulent when the numbers do not match.

If you receive a notice from the IRS and have any questions, please give us a call so we can assist you with understanding it.

On a related note, a recent AICPA survey of 1,005 U.S. adults noted that:

• 21% of Americans report having been victims of identity theft or attempted identity theft in the past year.

• 59% of victims did not report the crime to authorities.