New IRS Commissioner to Tackle Identity Theft
As I mentioned in a previous post, the IRS has recently come under fire by critics who say that the IRS does not do enough to treat victims of identity theft or to help them minimize the burden of responding to the crime.
Many identity-theft victims and their accountants have complained about IRS delays and miscommunications in resolving their claims. The IRS says that they are working hard to help victims of identity theft and combat this crime, which has prompted phony tax returns to jump more than sixfold over the past five years.
J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration has said that IRS must do more to combat the growing problem of employment-related and tax-fraud identity theft.
The new IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman has promised to develop a comprehensive program to fight identity theft. He says the IRS will train employees to assist taxpayers who have problems with identity theft by this fall. This falls in line with the new mission statement of the IRS, which was overhauled to reflect the agency’s new emphasis on serving taxpayers.
Additionally, he noted that the IRS recently established a Privacy, Information Protection and Data Security office in an effort to take a centralized approach to identity theft and a data security issues.
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Tags: Identity Theft, IRS commissioner, IRS mission statement, J. russel george, tax fraud, treasury inspector general
