Like many conscientious taxpayers, Susan filed her tax return early with a tax professional who told her she’d receive a refund. After waiting for months, she contacted the U.S. IRS, which said that a refund check had been issued in late April. She tried
to contact her tax pro, but he was nowhere to be found. The IRS told her that she was a victim of tax-refund fraud.
This case is fictional, but it’s representative of a common type of tax scam aimed toward taxpayers and tax professionals. Indeed, the public has had to be particularly vigilant this year when everything from tax to utility fraud have hit the headlines.
(See sidebar Fraudsters commit weather-related utility scams.)
But tax refund fraud has long been a lucrative scam for fraudsters and continues to be so. (See Identity theft tax-refund fraud: A growing epidemic, part 1 of 2, by Robert Holtfreter, Tiffany
McLeod and Adrian Harrington, Fraud Magazine, March/April 2014.)
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