Colorado agency: Fraud checks could delay some tax refunds

Online may end up being the only answer. Nevertheless, the agency will immediately contact any taxpayers whose personal information was used to access IRS applications. The hackers are said to have been using “personal data” acquired outside of the IRS’ system (that is to say, through ways that aren’t the IRS’s fault) along with malware to generate PINs for tax payers’ Social Security numbers.

This time, the crooks used a list of known SSNs to make repeated attempt to access the IRS’s Get My Electronic Filing PIN portal.

As the number of tax returns being filed online has continued to rise – it’s expected to be 80 percent of the 150 million returns filed this season – so too has the number of attempts by hackers to file fake returns and steal people’s refunds.

It’s not surprising that hackers find tax returns tempting.

The IRS says it will contact everyone whose account was affected.

The IRS has revealed that cyber attackers managed to trick its system in handing over more than 100,000 access codes for user accounts. Although the law requires employers to give employees their W-2s by January 31, most state tax agencies (and the IRS) usually don’t get the information until April.

Identity theft and tax fraud are on the rise in 2016, with an increasing number of fraudulent tax filings to the Internal Revenue Service through such popular online programs as TurboTax, H&R Block, and eFile. “We especially want to thank the law-enforcement community, tax professionals, consumer advocates, the states, other government agencies and particularly the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration for helping us in this battle against these persistent phone scams”.

Granted, the crooks needed an existing database of personal information to initiate their attack, such as names and Social Security Numbers (SSNs), but it seems as though they had acquired a handy list from an earlier data breach somewhere else. The PINs are used as an additional layer of security for some tax returns.

An IRS employee whose job was to assist taxpayers experiencing problems resulting from identity theft pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to stealing identities and orchestrating a tax-fraud scheme involving up to $1.5 million in fraudulent income tax returns. The agency also noted the stolen data leveraged to initiate the attack was not taken from IRS databases.