Do You File Taxes With South Carolina?

Heads up if you file tax returns with South Carolina.

On October 26 the S.C. Department of Revenue announced that approximately 3.6 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers were compromised.  

Government officials emphasized that no public funds were accessed or put at risk. No word from government officials on your whether your private funds were put at risk, though.

On October 10 the S.C. Division of Information Technology informed the Department of Revenue of a potential cyber attack. On October 16, investigators discovered two attempts to hack the system in early September. They later discovered that a previous attempt was made in late August. Government officials believe they have closed the vulnerability in the system.

If you have filed a South Carolina tax return since 1998, please visit protectmyid.com/scdor or call 1- 866-578-5422 to determine if your information is affected. If so, you can immediately enroll for free in one year of identity protection service with Experian.

The IRS Draws Congressional Attention

The IRS itself has been in the news recently. Whether it is the ham-handed treatment of Section 501(c)(4) political/nonprofit groups or the shadow funding of ObamaCare, the agency has been drawing attention and criticism. Today we are going to talk about two recent studies requested by Charles Boustany (U.S. Rep – LA). He presently serves as the Chairman of the House and Ways Subcommittee on Oversight.

The first report is titled “There Are Billions of Dollars in Undetected Tax Refund Fraud Resulting From Identity Theft.”  It addresses identity theft, which has been the number one consumer complaint with the Federal Trade Commission for 12 consecutive years.

The IRS presently processes returns and issues refunds before receiving the information forms with which to crosscheck. For example, if someone receives his/her Form W-2 and files for a refund in January, the IRS is issuing that refund check before the underlying wage information has been received from the employer, much less integrated into IRS information systems. This weakness has been exploited and has become a virtual cottage industry in certain cities such as Tampa, Florida.

Consider what TIGTA discovered:

·         2,137 returns resulting in $3.3 million in refunds were sent to one address in Lansing, Michigan

·         518 returns resulting in $1.8 million in refunds were sent to one address in Tampa, Florida

·         23,560 refunds totaling more than $16 million were issued to 10 bank accounts;  2,706 tax refunds totaling $7.3 million were issued to a single account

This is real money. TIGTA estimates that the IRS will issue almost $21 billion in identity-theft refunds over the next five years.

TIGTA made several recommendations, including:

·         Taking advantage of the information reporting available to the IRS. Social security benefit information, for example, is available in December - before filing season begins. Whereas this is a fraction of identity fraud, it is a positive step.

·         The IRS uses little of the data from its identity theft cases to develop patterns and trends which could be used to detect and prevent future tax fraud. Examples include whether the return was electronically or paper-filed, how the refund was issued, and, if issued by direct debit, the account number or debit card number receiving the refund.

·         Allow the IRS greater access to the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH). NDNH is a national database of newly-hired employees. It includes an employee’s name and address as well as wage information. By referencing information from prior year tax filings, the IRS could correlate NDNH data to determine whether reported wage reporting and claimed withholding appear fraudulent.

·         Encourage banks and work with federal agencies to ensure that direct deposit refunds are made only to an account in the taxpayer’s name.

·         Limit the number of tax refunds issued via direct deposit to the same bank account or debit card.

NOTE: That recommendation seems obvious.

“Substantial Changes Are Needed to the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number Program to Detect Fraudulent Applications”

The second report is disturbing. IRS employees had contacted Congress directly about supervisor misconduct and potential fraud in a program that reviews and verifies individual taxpayer identification numbers (ITINs). Congress then called in TIGTA to investigate.

We should explain that an ITIN is an Individual Tax Identification Number. ITINs were started in 1996 as tax identification for individuals who may have U.S. tax filing requirements but are not eligible for social security.

How can this happen?

·         Consider a German businessperson who invests in and receives income from a Miami shopping mall

·         Consider a Nigerian graduate student attending the University of Missouri (many) years ago with yours truly

·         Consider my brother-in-law’s wife, who is English and married to a U.S. citizen 

An ITIN will allow one to open a bank account and file tax returns. For example, if one’s spouse is English and one lives in England, the spouse will need an ITIN to file a U.S. income tax return. The children – who possibly have never been to the U.S. – will need ITINs to be claimed as dependents on the U.S. income tax return.

OBSERVATION: This is one of the absurd consequences of the U.S. worldwide income tax regime. A U.S. citizen has to file tax returns, even if he/she has lived outside the U.S. for many years, has a family outside the U.S. and has no immediate plans of repatriating to the U.S.

When one finally obtains a green card, one can transfer work and wage information from the ITIN to the Social Security Administration.

One applies for an ITIN by filing a form (Form W-7) and attaching supporting documents to verify one’s identity and foreign status. A passport will satisfy both the identity and foreign status requirements. The IRS will otherwise accept a combination of documents, including a foreign driver’s license, a foreign birth certificate, a foreign voter’s registration, a visa or other IRS-listed documents. The process usually takes place through the mail, which means that no US-agency employee actually sees the person applying for the ITIN.

Unfortunately, ITINs have been swept-up in political battles. For example, there is fear that the IRS will share this information with Immigration, although the IRS is not permitted by law to do so. This may discourage people from obtaining ITINs, so the argument goes. On the other hand, there are states that will allow one to obtain a driver’s license solely with an ITIN, which seems a perversion of its intended purpose.

TIGTA goes into the IRS to investigate the complaints. Here are some of its findings:

·         IRS management is not concerned with addressing fraudulent applications in the ITIN Operations Department because of the job security that a large inventory of applications to process provides. Management is interested only in the volume of applications that can be processed, regardless of whether they are fraudulent.

·         IRS management has indicated that no function of the IRS, including Criminal Investigation or the Accounts Management Taxpayer Assurance Program, is interested in dealing with ITIN application fraud.

·         IRS management has:

o    Created an environment which discourages tax examiners responsible for reviewing ITIN applications from identifying questionable applications.

o   Eliminated successful processes used to identify questionable ITIN application fraud patterns and schemes.

o   Established processes and procedures that are inadequate to verify each applicant’s identity and foreign status.

Good grief! The IRS disbanded an ITIN team that was having too much success, countered by provided virtually no training to new hires and transfers and put negative evaluations in overly-eager reviewers’ files.

TIGTA made nine recommendations in this report. The IRS agreed with seven and has already announced plans to implement interim changes. One has caused quite the consternation in the immigrant community by requiring copies of original documents with ITIN applications.

OBSERVATION: Let’s be fair here: would you be comfortable sending original copies of anything to the IRS? Assuming you can find that birth certificate from the mother country, how are you going to replace it when the IRS loses the thing?

A Tax Crook Story

I have previously argued against draconian laws to protect against the morally unscrupulous. The key concept here is draconian: the little good the law does is far outweighed by its burden on society. Sometimes I believe that recent tax regulation is approaching this line.

And then I read about Todd Halpern, a tax preparer in New Jersey.

In 2008 Halpern purchased a tax preparation business from the widow of the prior owner. He received all the computers and client records in the purchase. Makes sense: the widow didn’t need them. The new practice required a new electronic filing number, but Halpern did not obtain one. He kept the previous owner’s number. Why? Because Halpern’s criminal record would keep him from getting a new number.

Then he prepares a tax return for the mom of a client. The problem is that the mom had no income. She collected social security and was claimed as a dependent on her son’s return.  Halpern falsified her return, using fake income and deductions, to generate a refund. To complete the loop, he had the refund deposited to his account.

He kept doing this. After all, what could go wrong? The IRS estimates that he received approximately $375,000 in diverted refunds between July and August, 2009.

The guy is a crook. There exist enough laws to put him in jail.

Or maybe he can run for Congress.

The IRS and Identity Theft

One of the downsides of increased electronic tax filing is increased identity theft. We had one of our e-filings intercepted this year by the IRS for identity mismatch. The IRS did not accept the e-file and instead required a paper return with Form 14039, Identity Theft Affidavit, attached.

I was looking at (OK, I was skimming) a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued May 3rd. Imagine my surprise to learn that the IRS has no special procedures for our return with Form 14039 attached.

The IRS considers the paper filing to be a duplicate return and does not immediately process it. An employee enters a transaction code into the taxpayer file to memorialize receipt. The return then goes to a separate queue to be worked on, possibly after April 15 when the filing season has ended. The IRS transfers the file to Duplicate function for initial review. If Duplicate considers it an identity theft case, the file is again transferred, quite likely to the Accounts Management function. It is there assigned an assistor, who requests copies of the original tax returns and begins the process, including correspondence, of determining who the legitimate taxpayer is.

This process is slow and the refund can be delayed until late in the year or even the following year. The average case resolution is 414 days.

The assistor very likely works in Accounts Management. The problem is that these employees also answer the toll-free telephone lines during busy season. According to TIGTA, 87% of assistors working identity fraud also answered the phones, and 60% stated that they worked the toll-free line exclusively. TIGTA considers the optimal assistor inventory (that is, caseload) to be 100 to 125 per assistor, but the average assistor had an inventory exceeding 300 cases.

The identity problem is new enough that IRS guidelines are spread out over almost 40 sections in the Internal Revenue Manual. Sometimes the guidelines are inconsistent. The IRS in addition does not have procedures to spot trends which could be useful in detecting or preventing future fraud. One problem, for example, is sending notices to the last address of record, which could just be the person perpetrating the fraud.

Training has also been an issue. TIGTA’s survey showed that almost half of the assistors believed that their training was not sufficient. In one office, 13% of assistors had received no identity theft training.

To be fair, the IRS has agreed with TIGTA’s findings and has begun implementation of many recommendations. For example, there will be specialized units in Accounts Management to work only identity fraud cases.

Then we have Congress. Three representatives this week introduced the “Fighting Fraud Act,” which would double the current penalties for tax preparers who are involved with identity theft. The intent is to give the IRS greater incentive to prosecute this type of theft, presumably because the potential payoff is greater.

Really? This is the best the mandarin class can dream up? Here is an idea: the IRS assigns a PIN to every preparer. Require every professionally-prepared return to require the preparer’s PIN. If a preparer is involved with this type of nonsense, the IRS revokes the PIN and bans the preparer from working before the IRS.

Will this stop the completely unscrupulous? Here is a question in return: in human history, has it ever been possible to stop the completely unscrupulous?

IRS Refund Processing Delays

If you are wondering whether the IRS is taking longer to process and issue refunds, you are correct. This has been aggravated by a glitch in the “Where’s My Refund?” tool on the IRS website. The glitch occurs when you file your return electronically, wait a few days and then go to “Where’s My Refund,” which tells you that the IRS is not aware of your return. This is unnerving, of course. It is also incorrect.

What has occurred is that the IRS is tweaking its filters to counter identity fraud. Each year the IRS revises the Electronic Fraud Detection System (EFDS) to reflect fraud patterns detected the previous filing season. Last year, for example, over one million returns were flagged. The returns then go to personnel for review, and therein is the problem. There are not enough people to review the returns.  The ideal time for identity theft is early in the filing season, as the thief is trying to beat you to your refund. The IRS therefore has its fraud filters at their highest setting early in the season.

The IRS has released the customary “we are working on it” statement. It has also reinforced its commitment to getting refunds out within 21 days or less.