Sign Up At irs.gov Before Crooks Do It For You

tsu doh nimh writes If you're an American and haven't yet created an account at irs.gov, you may want to take care of that before tax fraudsters create an account in your name and steal your personal and tax data in the process. Brian Krebs shows how easy it is for scammers to register an account in your name and view your current and past W2s and tax filings with the IRS, and tells the story of a New York man who — after receiving notice from the agency that someone had filed a phony return in his name — tried to get a copy of his transcript and found someone had already registered his SSN to an email address that wasn't his. Apparently, having a credit freeze prevents thieves from doing this, because the IRS relies on easily-guessed knowledge-based authentication questions from Equifax.

Comments

I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[jcr]

Taxing people for what they earn has always been a brain-dead policy. Taxes should be based on consumption, not production.

-jcr

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[blue9steel]

Maybe, it depends on how you define consumption. If you use a narrow definition that sort of tax would be incredibly regressive. If you're going to tax individuals directly (which I don't think is really the best system) then you should probably use something along the lines of a flat tax on profits, with profit being defined as anything over the median income. (anything below that is pretty much guaranteed to be cost of living expenses in any rational definition)

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[suutar]

yeah, but that way lies a long list of which food, clothing and medical expenses are worthy of being tax exempt and which, being "obviously" luxuries, need not be.

Wouldn't it be easier to tax everything and rebate minimum cost of living expenses?

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

You know exactly how that would go.

GM would start producing luxury cars made out of "food."

Cable boxes would come with heart rate monitors so cable TV could be considered a "medical expense."

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Firethorn]

Yeah, but to go along with the original AC's premise about abolishing the IRS, I have to tell those that want to 'get rid of the IRS' that you'd need the IRS even under there scheme. As long as the government is collecting taxes, it needs to have a department collecting them.

Department of War, Department of Defense, same difference. Ditto with whatever you 'replace' the IRS with.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[kuhnto]

This reminds me of a great episode of the Planet Money podcast: "How The Burrito Became A Sandwich" http://www.npr.org/blogs/money... If there is a Tax, there will be a loophole, and a fix, and a loophole, the burrito becomes a sandwich...

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Obfuscant]

If you tax people on what they earn, people declare certain things as 'not an earning'.

Yes, the People through their elected representatives who write and pass the tax legislation. It's not like Joe Smith gets to decide that this year's salary is "not an earning" all on his own.

If you tax people on what they OWN, then you don't screw over anyone.

Except people who plan ahead for the future and save their money so they have something to live on when they retire. You screw over people who work hard and provide a good house and nice things for their family. When you tax what people own, you tax it this year, and then you tax it again next year, and then again next year... which pretty much screws EVERYONE -- except those who save nothing and live hand to mouth. And creates more of those as the guy who owns the nice house has to scrape up yet another federal tax to keep it, even if he's lost his job and has zero income.

Taxing ownership is a ruse to cover class envy, nothing more. Just how much of what people own should the government take away from them every year (in addition to the effects of inflation and depreciation that reduce the actual values)? Ten percent? Twelve? Just five?

Do you tax retirement plans that people haven't yet vested in, or haven't yet received? Who "owns" that money?

Do you target family farms for enforcement, so they have to come up with ten percent of the value of the farm every year in taxes? Do you care if that shuts them down because they've had to sell it off to pay the taxes?

and if you can't pay the taxes on it you shouldn't buy it.

Another voice telling people what they should and shouldn't buy. That house you bought ten years ago when you had that good job, and now you're unemployed and cannot afford the yearly federal "gurps" tax on it? You shouldn't have bought it. You don't deserve it if you can't afford to pay the taxes on it today. We know, you worked hard all your life and saved up to buy it, but we simply don't care. The fact that local property taxes can do that to someone is bad enough, you want to add a federal tax on top to make it happen sooner and more often?

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Obfuscant]

Who decides what I OWN is worth?

The government will happily give you an estimate. The real answer will come from the auctioneer when he sells off your house that the government has confiscated to pay off whatever taxes they think you owe on it. If he's good at his job and the right people show up, boy is your tax bill going to be huge. And if the government estimate of what it is worth is a bit too high, well, you'll get a bit of the money from the sale. Enough to rent someplace nice down by the tracks, probably. Enjoy what we let you have, Citizen.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[mrchaotica]

Progressive income taxes have resulted in the largest debt in the history of mankind.

On the contrary, irresponsible tax cuts without commensurate decreases in spending have resulted in the largest debt in the history of mankind.

We could talk about the "coincidence" that said tax cuts disproportionally favored the wealthy (i.e., they made the tax less progressive), and that spending actually increased and most of that increase was for war.... but you don't really want to admit that, do you?

It's such an inconvenient fact that deficits tend to drop due to the policies of liberals and rise due to the policies of [neo-]conservatives, when [neo-]conservatives desperately try to lie and claim it's the other way around...

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[operagost]

I'm starting to think that having private citizens pay any tax directly to the federal government is a problem. It completely overrides their right to govern themselves at the state and local level. Because the federal government is entitled to so much of the people's wealth, it is given de facto power over everything. Disagree? Then ask why every state's drinking age is 21.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[jcr]

Saving and investing is precisely the behavior that we should encourage.

-jcr

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[amRadioHed]

I feel so sorry for all those wealthy people bearing such a terrible economic burden. If the burden gets too bad though, there is a solution. They can always just forfeit their income and live the carefree, unburdened life of the poor.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[mrchaotica]

Georgia makes such a distinction. If you go to a supermarket and buy the ingredients to make a sandwich they'll be taxed at something like 2%, but if you have the people at the supermarket's deli counter make you a sandwich it'll get taxed at something like 7%. If you buy both, your receipt will show the 2% tax applied to the subtotal of the sandwich ingredients and 7% tax applied to the subtotal of the prepared food. (In GA, taxes rates are also set on a city and county basis, so the actual numbers may vary.)

IMO, the categorization does get kind of arbitrary and capricious. For example, what about a pre-made sandwich in the deli's refrigerated case? What about a sandwich made in a factory instead of the deli? What about a doughnut made by the bakery vs. a boxed doughnut from the junk food aisle?

You could say "all the food bought at the grocery store gets taxed at the lower rate," but then the grocery store's deli has an unfair advantage over the likes of Subway. Or you could say "everything that's a processed dish (rather than a raw ingredient) gets taxed at the higher rate," but lots of things (e.g. cheese) can be either depending on how the customer intends to use them.

I dislike the IRS as much as anyone, but I think taxing income is a lot simpler to make progressive than trying to categorize all the different kinds of products available would be.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Sarten-X]

This depends on what you mean by "progressive".

A consumption-based tax is very simple and easy to tie to consumption, by attaching it to goods as we already do with sales tax. That matches well with the definition of "progressive" that refers to having more tax come from those who use more.

Unfortunately, if you're looking for a "progressive" definition related to making progress in the areas of social justice and economic fairness, consumption taxes are disproportionately burdensome on lower-income demographics. It turns out that people only eat so much and have so much time for nonessentials. The rich often literally have so much money that they make more (usually from investments) than they can spend. With a consumption tax, their effective tax rate is a far smaller percentage of what they make than the effective tax rate of a less-wealthy individual.

The standard theory is that we tax profit because the public contribution (through governmental support) allowed the individual to profit, and fostered the profit-conducive environment. If that is the case, then people should not be taxed based on their own consumption, but rather on what others had to give up to support their profitable endeavor.

Let's assume I am a billionaire who commutes mainly via private helicopter. It doesn't bother me at all to throw a few thousand dollars toward a local road-improvement project. For a struggling single parent to do the same would be a significant hardship, even though they would be far more likely to actually use and benefit from the improved road. Under a taxation system that encourages a fair distribution of hardship, I would be responsible for a far larger portion of the project, simply because I can afford to without an unfair amount of actual harm.

Unfortunately, judging actual hardship is difficult. Even as a billionaire, I might already be donating all of my incoming profit to charities supporting the global community, so taxing me more would only reduce the amount of good I could do directly. That struggling single parent might not be struggling if they didn't spend so much on cigarettes and alcohol, effectively somewhat-freely choosing their fate.

That's why our tax code is so complicated today. The United States has been trying to define "fair" in a way that covers everyone's situation, and for the most part it's been okay. The modern economic system has thrown a few new wrenches into the machine, and we need to work those out, but it's still trying to be a fair system.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[kqs]

Not to worry. I don't own anything; my house and cars are owned by KqsCo and leased to me for a nominal fee. And since they are business expenses for the company...

If you assume that there is any plan which cannot be gamed, you don't have enough imagination.

I'm fine with a combination of income, sales, business and property taxes. You may be able to avoid one of them, but avoiding all of them at the same time may be more expensive than paying the damn taxes.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Raul654]

> BTW, the deficit reductions under Clinton were the direct result of the policies of Reagan and Gingrich.

Bullshit. The Clinton surplus was created by the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which every single Republican in congress voted against.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[Qzukk]

10% flat sales tax on everything (consumption tax, also applied at borders)

I'm fine with that, my imported megayacht never crosses the border. Here's $5 for the rubber dinghy I come ashore in.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[master_kaos]

We have that in canada, and it really is confusing on what is taxable and what isnt.
"Basic" groceries are not taxable. But then there are some items that wouldn't be considered basic groceries that are exempt from tax (such as an unbaked pizza from the grocery store, but a frozen pizza is taxable).

https://www.gov.mb.ca/finance/...

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[mrchaotica]

Have you seen our tax code? When I took Federal Income Taxation in law school, I had to get a copy of the tax code, and it was about six inches thick. (I don't remember, or care, if or how much it was annotated.) That's a mighty long list of exceptions to consumption tax.

First of all, income tax is production tax, not consumption tax, so you've got your thinking backwards to begin with.

Second, just because the current implementation of the income tax is riddled with loopholes and power-grubbing statist bullshit, doesn't mean it has to be. A progressive income tax could be as simple as setting tax rate = f(income) where f(income) is a sigmoid curve such that f($0) = 0% and the limit as income approaches infinity is 100%. Politicians would fight over the parameters, of course, and most people would need a slightly fancier calculator to compute it, but the end result would fit on a page.

In contrast, to make a sales tax progressive it must be complicated, because somebody has to decide which goods people at each income level should be "allowed" to afford. In contrast, a simple sales tax where all goods are taxed at the same rate would be inherently regressive because low-income people spend 100% of their income buying stuff while high-income people don't.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[radarskiy]

The table at your link shows Public Debt Outstanding, not Debt Held by the Public. The former includes intragovernmental holdings. For example, the surplus gathers by Social Security counts as against the Public Debt Outstanding. If the Social Security surplus is greater than the Federal Budget surplus, the Public Debt Outstanding will increase.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[gurps_npc]

Are you really stupid enough to think everything you just described doesn't happen now?

Normal people have mortgages. If they can't afford the house, they have to sell it. That's the way the world works.

As for on top of, I did not say that. I want a federal property tax to replace existing federal taxes.

As for how much tax 5% property tax (on everything excluding IRAs and 1 home of upto 200K value) per year would allow us to totally remove all federal income tax

If you make it 2% that only applied if you owned more than 1 million dollars, we could lower the top tax rate to 30% and keep it there.

The fact that you thought 10% or more indicates your knowledge of the math and economics involved is seriously flawed. Frankly, you don't know enough to have this argument.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[AK Marc]

My problem is that the prebate checks are not big enough. The tax should be 45% (or whatever necessary to balance the budget), and the prebate should be 8x what the Fair Tax people are currently proposing. It'll then be a UBI, sufficient for a person to live above the poverty line without working.

Also, I'd link the tax to last year's budget. There'd never be another deficit. The tax will go up or down 1% or whatever to make the lines always match.

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[AK Marc]

Evolution has been debated for over 100 years, but only the pro-evolution views are being upvoted here. Is that because the treatment here is not fair, or the truth is not "unbiased"? Only one can be true, right?

Re:I'm all for abolishing the IRS

[AK Marc]

Not everything evolves. Many things become evolutionary dead ends. Most creatures are. But people that don't understand evolution assign things to it that aren't in it, and believe that everything evolves.

Hell already froze over.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Maybe, some day, Congress will actually fix some of the real fucking problems we have, with having a pseudo, tech. intergrated Government. And maybe, Hell will actually freeze over!

I hear Hell already froze over - several decades ago.

It was a particularly cold snap during winter in Michigan, with sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures. The expanding ice blew out a small (millpond-ish) dam. The water under the ice rushed down the river and overflowed it, pouring down the main street of the little village of Hell, Michigan. It was several inches deep when it slowed enough that the extreme cold froze it solid.

Since then a lot of the stuff that was waiting for Hell to freeze over has been happeng. That explains the last several decades nicely, eh? B-)

Re:When you have a security hole, you close it

[NeoNormal]

we fully intend to follow Obama's lead and use the IRS as a weapon against our enemies domestic and domestic.

Obama's lead? If you think he started this, you must be new around here (planet earth).

Re:Clearly a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could have just gone to the doctor and paid out of pocket, without having to pay a middle layer to deny the claim.

Hmm, Canada got this one right.

[myvirtualid]

For years, CRA, the Canadian equivalent to the IRS, has been including Web Authentication Codes (WACs) with the annual notice of assessment, that is, their summary of your personal income tax submission, snail mailed to your address of record some weeks after you submit your personal tax return.

Your WAC changes every year. Without it, you cannot access your account in CRA's online systems.

And it isn't enough: You also need your SIN and the amount recorded on a particular line of your return (or notice, I cannot remember which).

Now here is where my memory gets hazy: Once you register for online access, I think they might send a one-time code to your address, which is required to activate your account.

The only way to subvert this system is to tamper with postal delivery, which means fraudsters must take specific, intentional action and break multiple federal laws (postal acts, the income tax act, etc.). There ain't no easy to guess stuff in the Canadian system. The bar is sufficiently high, the risks to fraudsters very high, i.e., hard time.

Sign up?

[TechyImmigrant]

I just went to www.irs.gov

The advice to sign up there may be reasonable, but the words 'sign up' or anything semantically similar do not appear on the front page. It's not obvious where you would go to try to sign up.

It's not https either.

Re:Sign up?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "get my transcript" (from the article's link)
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Get-Transcript

Re:Sign up?

[mellon]

Request a transcript, like the author of the article did. However, bear in mind that if you register for an account, now all a fraudster needs to get into your irs.gov account is pwnership of your computer, which may be even easier to get than the personal information required to sign up.

Re:Sign up?

[Coren22]

Following the links in TFA, it leads me to here:

https://sa.www4.irs.gov/icce-c...

I agree however, I would not even think of clicking a Get Transcripts button in order to create an IRS account.

Re:Sign up?

[TechyImmigrant]

I did. That's how I found the place to sign up.

I signed up.

It gave password rules and validated the password on the fly with four green ticks, one against each rule (> 8 chars, special chars etc.). I used a 32 character password generated from my password manager.

The web page then errors out each time I tried to enter the password, saying it needed a valid password, even though the password was declared valid each time. In the end I got it to work when I reduced the password length below 20 characters. This may be due to the length, or some other difference, since my password manager was creating a different password each time I fiddled with the generator rules.

The whole thing sticks of basic programming incompetence.

 

Re:Sign up?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing stinks of basic programming incompetence

Yep, that's how you know you're in the right place.

Re:Clearly a scam

[ralphsiegler]

hey, you get to vote for the lapdog of the elite of your choice

Re:TELL US HOW TO REGISTER

[roc97007]

I just did it successfully, after getting the error you got the first time through. You're right, the website does not clearly have a place to log in -- you have to request a document or initiate a payment in order to get the login screen, wherein you can also create an account. In defense of OP, this may be the reason they did not include a link to a login page -- there doesn't appear to be one.

But to your point, there seems to be a bug in the form, where if you put any punctuation or special characters in the required passphrase, it misreports the issue as a bad password. Taking the exclamation point out of the passphrase caused my password (a different token) to be accepted. For what it's worth, YMMV, etc etc. (This is the government we're talking about...)

Re:they don't make it easy

[roc97007]

Sorry. 4 bits. 1/16. 6.25%

Which is still a *lot* of successes. Probably a better return on average than the "We are from The Microsoft and we are calling you because your computer is infested with the viruses" scam.

"Knowledge-based" questions are really bad

[RobinH]

I was signing up for something through my bank, and it was asking me some of these questions like, "Which of these employers did you previously work for?" Unfortunately none of them were correct (this wasn't a huge surprise because I had already tried to correct my credit report information... they seem to have me confused with someone else). That meant I couldn't continue, but it turns out if you start the test over again, it gives you the same question but randomly selects the "wrong" answers. All I had to do was remember what the original multiple-choice answers were, and pick the one that didn't change. Basically that means there's almost zero security with this method of authentication.

Never trust the government

[JSmooth]

This is what you get with the lowest bidder.

Password ended in a '%'

Got this error:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, apache@%{Host}.rup.afsiep.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

We get the IRS We Deserve

[nealric]

It's convenient to complain about the IRS, but its flaws are a result of our own animus. Note the flaws of the agency are separate from those of the underlying tax code it has to administer, which it does not write (blame Congress for that).

We don't want to fund the IRS, so its budget keeps getting cut, while the list of demands placed upon it increases. Nobody likes the IRS, so it has difficulty attracting high-quality job applicants. Would you want to work for an agency constantly being berated for doing its job? The workers are forced to do without simple benefits private sector workers take for granted, such as free water coolers and coffee because of public stinginess. I recently read an article in a trade publication that states the IRS has fewer than 750 workers younger than 25 out of a workforce of almost 70,000. The figures aren't great for under 35s either. With that kind of recruitment, it's little wonder that they are a bit behind the times.

Of course, there are the scandals, but those have involved small subsets within the organization. If one subgroup of 5 employees in Exempt Organizations did something wrong, public opinion pillories the remaining 69,995 employees. One example of waste becomes an assumption that everything is waste.

To share a personal story as a tax professional: I applied to the IRS coming out of school out of an interest in protecting the public interest. The pay was just over 1/3 of what I was being offered in the private sector (albeit with slightly better benefits). The recruiters did not exactly exude excitement about their jobs. Ultimately, that was too tough of a pill to swallow. Now, I help companies minimize their corporate taxes.

Protecting the Criminals

[Jason Levine]

From the article:

“Since I was alerting them that this transaction was fraudulent, their privacy rules prevented them from telling me any more information, such as the routing number and account number of that deposit,” Kasper said. “They basically admitted this was to protect the privacy of the criminal, not because they were going to investigate right away. In fact, they were very clear that the matter would not be investigated further until a fraud affidavit and accompanying documentation were processed by mail.”

My identity was stolen once. Someone got my name, DOB, SSN, and mailing address. They used this to open a credit card (*cough*Capital One*cough*) in my name. Due to a quirk, I was lucky and the card came to me, not them. Once I reported it as fraudulent (after having to argue that, no, my wife who was standing RIGHT THERE didn't open it under my name without telling me), they refused to tell me where the card was supposed to have gone to. They told me that this was because if they told me and I went and shot the person, they would be liable. Then, they proceeded to stonewall both me and the police until the investigation was dropped.

The lesson here? Companies (and government agencies) don't care about you. Fraud can be written off and is no big deal to them even if it ruins your credit rating and takes years of your life to fix. For them, that's just one line item in a million. I was lucky that I didn't lose anything and it was relatively easy to fix (close fraudulent account, freeze credit file), but others aren't so lucky.

Re:Protecting the Criminals

[fatwilbur]

My identity was stolen once

Not to belittle the experience you went through, but this would happen less if people fought back against the banks. Remember, there is no such thing as identify theft. Nobody can steal a "number" from you.

The actual crime that is taking place is bank fraud. If someone walks into a bank (or online), fraudulently represents themselves, and gets money from the bank - exactly what part of that are you liable for? An appropriate legal threat for any personal ramifications or credit file tampering from fraud they brought on themselves should resolve the situation, and if it doesn't a lawsuit should bring you back to par (and pay for your legal costs too).

If this forces the bank to put in place more serious, even (gasp) inconvenient processes in place to verify someone's identity, so be it. That or suck up the losses they bring onto themselves.

Re:Tax something that correlates strongly

[amRadioHed]

And that method is starting to fall apart as high efficiency and alternative fuel vehicles become more common.

Is this site legit?

[Scragglykat]

IRS.gov looks like a GoDaddy placeholder... I don't want to sign up there.

Re: Be careful what you ask for

[j-beda]

What, they don't use more gas / pay more gas tax than the rest of us?

Not in proportion to the wear on the roadway they produce. I think the roadway wear goes as either the square or the cube of the weight per axle, and the big trucks weigh a lot more per axle. Nope - looks like it is a fourth power relationship:

"Road damage rises steeply with axle weight, and is estimated "as a rule of thumb... for reasonably strong pavement surfaces" to be proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It looks like the max axle weight is something like 20,000 lbs. while the average passanger vehicle weighs something like 3500lbs, which would be under 2000 lbs per axle. Thus each very heavy truck can be even more than ten times the axle weight of the average car - and 10^4 is 10,000, so that truck can cause as much wear as 10,000 cars. Or maybe that 10,000 factor is per axle (five axles in an "18 wheeler"), so maybe it is a factor of 25,000 when comparing an 18-wheeler to a car.

Wow - trucks really tear up the roads!