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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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?

[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: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.

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.

Is this site legit?

[Scragglykat]

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