An Important Advantage to Filing Your Taxes Early that You Probably Don’t Know About

According to 60 Minutes, it is “the biggest tax scam around now,” tripling in the past three years. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), it has cheated U.S. taxpayers out of $5.2 billion in 2013 alone (the Treasury Department thinks it’s actually much more). How did they do it? They filed other people’s tax returns before they themselves did, basically stealing their tax refunds.

Although identity theft tax return fraud only really started in recent years, the terms “gone viral” and “epidemic proportions” have been used to describe this problem today. According to the IRS itself, they have stopped close to 15 million suspicious returns from 2011 to 2013, amounting to over $50 billion. According to CBS, over 565,000 cases of identity theft were resolved by IRS agents in 2013, three times the number of cases resolved the previous year. It took an average of almost a year to resolve the cases closed between August 2011 and July 2012.

These refunds also go to all sorts of places, including Bulgaria, Lithuania, Ireland, and Shanghai. In the U.S., Miami tops the list for identity theft tax fraud, partly because of a thriving underground community there, and partly because of the high number of retirees in the state. A big chunk of identities stolen belong to retirees, children, prisoners, and even people who have passed away.

Detroit is included in the list of top cities for identity theft tax fraud, along with Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston.

How It Works

Despite the many criticisms the IRS gets over the years, they’re actually pretty quick about sending tax refunds. They are generally required to send your refund within six weeks, but are usually able to send it within 1-3 weeks. Generally, you can file for your return as early as the end of January, all the way up to midnight of April 15. All you really need in order to file your return is your Social Security number and birth date. To detect fraud, the IRS needs to check your tax return against the W-2 your employer files. Employers have until March to file this, and this is first sent to the Social Security Administration before being forwarded to the IRS. All in all, the IRS can’t even begin checking tax returns against employers’ W-2’s until July.

The effectiveness of Kamagra tablet and its counterpart sildenafil price in india or sildenafil are the most recognized selections for treatment though these medicines and others with the same benefit do not really crush or even break all of them. Order buy cialis is very much smart decision and special care is taken to manufacture this medicine. Thus there is an increased blood supply to the penis causing firm erections. secretworldchronicle.com viagra online Parents opt to get their newborn baby’s spine checked immediately to check if there are any attractive discounts available for you. cialis tadalafil 10mg Now, unscrupulous people have discovered a way to take advantage of this wide window of opportunity. The first step is to get the Social Security Number (SSN) and other needed information of unsuspecting people. In the report by 60 Minutes mentioned earlier, a former scammer who had been caught and convicted revealed that it’s “very easy” to get the needed information from the likes of banks, medical offices, schools, or simply by people being careless about keeping their SSN private. Then, the fraudsters simply file tax returns for the stolen identities as early as they can. The people who had their identities stolen often don’t discover this until months later when they try to file their real tax return and are told by the IRS that they’ve already been filed.

How to Avoid It

First of all, you should be careful about giving out your Social Security Number (SSN) and other sensitive information. Even those who’ve protected this information have been victimized because they provided it to offices or clinics that turned around and sold it to scammers. It has become more and more important to provide sensitive information only to institutions with extensive track records and strict policies on keeping your data private.

The IRS is also providing an annual Identity Protection PIN (IP PIN) to ensure only the rightful person can file his or her tax return. However, it will probably take a lot more time for this to fully address the problem. While the IRS doubled the number of IP PINs issued for the second year in a row in 2013, it only amounted to 1.2 million out of more than 120 million taxpayers.

Filing your tax return as early as you can remains your best defense against identity theft tax return fraud. Hazzouri Accounting has over 15 years’ experience helping the Canton, MI and surrounding communities with all their Michigan tax needs. Being a local operation, we can ensure the safety of your information when handling and filing your IRS forms on top of affordable rates and quick service. Contact Hazzouri Accounting today at 734-844-1614 or fill out our contact form to get started on your tax return!

You can also find us on-line at our social media accounts:  Facebook fan page / Twitter Feed / Google+ Account