Tax Fraud Getting More Advanced – Are You Prepared?
It used to be that tax fraud was fairly cut and dry. Essentially, it involved an individual or company who, for various reasons, tried to purposely fudge on their taxes, either by understating their income or by trying to completely skip out on filing a return. Those practices certainly still exists, despite the IRS’s constant efforts combat them. However, tax fraud as evolved, like everything else involving taxes. What used to be a matter of defrauding the IRS out of money has now turned into a high stakes ploy to cheat the taxman as well as the taxpayer.
Meet the new tax fraud. Now, scammers are not only out to steal money from the IRS, but they are also using other taxpayers to do it. Thus, they are cheating the IRS and they might be cheating you. Scammers use all kinds of tactics to trick people out of their tax refunds, or even worse, steal their identity along with their refunds and any other assets they can get their hands on.
These days, out of all the common tax scams that take place every tax season, a third of them involve some kind of identify theft. As early as 2011 the IRS only warned of one such scam of this type. Times have changed and so have scammers. It got so bad this year that the IRS reportedly received about 12,000 complaints every week regarding a phone scam in which a scammer tried to obtain the recipient’s personal information by posing as an employee of the IRS.
The battle will certainly continue as technology advances and scammers come up with new schemes as a rapid pace. In order to avoid these kinds of scams you can always contact the IRS, as well as a trusted accounting and tax planning firm, like GROCO. We can help you prepare for and avoid getting scammed. Give us a call at 1-877-CPA-2206 or click here to contact us online.
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