Thursday, August 31, 2017

IRS won't warn a half-million victims about undocumented workers stealing Social Security numbers

NBC News Local ^ | August 30, 2017 | by Bob Segal 

Washington, D.C. (WTHR) - Two years after WTHR exposed the Internal Revenue Service ignoring millions of cases of identity theft, the federal agency’s own inspector general says the problem is even larger than expected – and the IRS is unwilling to take steps to protect hundreds of thousands of victims.
The U.S. Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reviewed millions of tax returns filed by undocumented workers in 2015. The inspector general released a formal audit report this summer showing those tax returns include an estimated 1.5 million cases of identity theft. (That’s for a single year reviewed.)
After WTHR’s reporting, the IRS pledged to better identify victims, to place a warning on their accounts and to notify them of suspected identity theft. But the TIGTA audit reveals that did not happen in hundreds of thousands of cases.
According to the inspector general’s review, more than 830,000 victims were not identified even though identity thieves electronically filed tax returns with evidence that they used the victims’ Social Security Numbers to gain employment.
(Excerpt) Read more at wthr.com ...

T-Shirt