Most illegal
immigrants who pay taxes have stolen someone else’s legal identity, and
the IRS doesn’t do a very good job of letting
those American citizens and legal immigrants know they’re being impersonated,
the tax agency’s inspector general said in a new report released Thursday.
The theft
creates major problems for the American citizens and legal foreign workers
whose identities are stolen, and who have to deal with explaining money they
never earned.
But the IRS only manages to identify half of the
potentially 1.4 million people likely affected by the fraud in 2015, the
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in its report.
“Cases of
employment identity theft can cause significant burden to innocent taxpayers,
including the incorrect computation of taxes based on income that does not
belong to them,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general.
It’s long
been a conundrum in the federal government.
The IRS knows of 2.4 million people a year
who file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, which is
generally given out to immigrants who aren’t authorized to work. But the IRS is not allowed to talk with Homeland
Security to help agents identify who and where those taxpayers are.
The migrants
file their forms with their ITINs, but the W-2 forms they submit show valid
Social Security numbers that they fraudulently gave to their employer to clear
an initial work authorization check.
A staggering
87 percent of forms filed online using ITINs showed income credited to a Social
Security number. More than half of forms filed by paper also showed that same
fraudulent behavior.
The IRS tries to mark the files of the fraud
victims when electronic filings are used. But the tax agency misses about half
of the victims, the inspector general said.
For paper forms, the IRS did even worse, the audit found.
The tax
agency, in its official reply to the report, insisted it takes identity theft
“very seriously.”
Kenneth C.
Corbin, commissioner of the IRS’s wage and investment division, said it
has just completed a pilot program to figure out how to notify taxpayers
they’re the victims of fraud.
But he said
in most of the cases they’re missing right now, the Social Security number
given is for someone who doesn’t have a tax account on their system. He said
they can’t create a notification for someone who’s not in their files, and said
because of privacy concerns they won’t just send a notification to the
addresses listed.
He also said
there are cases where someone knowingly loaned out their Social Security to an
unauthorized worker, and thus wasn’t properly a victim but a conspirator.
The IRS agreed to some of the inspector
general’s recommendations but refused others. Mr. Corbin said the IRS would do what it could, but pleaded
poverty, saying the agency has “limited resources.”
“We cannot
commit to additional actions that would require significant resources to
accomplish,” he wrote.
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/22/14-million-illegals-working-stolen-social-security/
