I was getting those calls several times a week a couple of months ago. I actually never answered the phone but they always left a message. Let’s just say the callers command of the English language was lacking. At the time it was a PITA but now I kind of miss the attention.
If your business or if you personally owe money to the IRS, they will not contact you via email nor will they call you on the telephone. They will send you letters via snail mail, numerous letters, and if you do not respond to those in a timely manner, eventually via certified mail - return requested. In the letter(s) they will actually ask you to contact their local IRS office either in person or via telephone, the telephone number which can easily confirmed with a simple search of the real IRS website (IRS.Gov) as being legit.
The IRS also does not take payments over the telephone via a credit card and they will never request one via something like a Western Union transfer – another real tip off to it being a scam.
The IRS rarely takes criminal legal action against a delinquent tax payer unless there is a case of criminal tax evasion of fraud or for years of failing to file returns and not paying taxes owed. They will not threaten you with arrest for simply owning back taxes nor will they ever tell you that they are sending the local police department over to your home or place of business to arrest you and put you in jail if you do not immediately pay the entire balance over the phone via a credit card or wire transfer.
They are more interested in working out a payment plan first (with interest and penalties of course which you can BTW sometimes get reduced or waived depending on the circumstances or with an “offer in compromise”) or as a very last resort they will garnishing your wages or impound your bank accounts or other assets but not without notifying you first via certified mail. Trust me. I know both professionally and personally on how it works.
Let’s just say the callers command of the English language was lacking.
Speaking of scams, last year at my work, several employees received an email that appeared to be from our corporate CFO who was out of the country at the time on a business trip, instructing them that a payment had to be made immediately via a reverse wire transfer to one of our new “vendors” in China and for an important and “highly confidential business acquisition” and with the wire instructions to pay them and the email also requested our banking routing and account number for confirmation purposes and also had an embedded link in order to fill out the banking information.
While it did appear to be as coming from our CFO’s corporate email address, one tip off was the somewhat broken/bad English, and another was that it was not sent to anyone in our finance department but to employees who were in departments like engineering and operations and maintenance.
Fortunately, one of the first people to receive it, right away reported it to our IT department but not before several others had forwarded it to our AP department, a few of them clicking on the embedded link before forwarding, which attempted to install malware. Sounded a lot like this scam:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2015/august/business-e-mail-compromise/business-e-mail-compromise
Or this one:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mattel-loses-3m-email-phishing-scam-chinese-authorities-save-day-1552232
Fortunately, we have very stringent controls over all our going payments that require three sign offs, one of them being our controller who immediately saw it as being a scam. Our IT department had send out yet another one of those “Beware of suspicious emails - don’t click on any embedded links” emails as did our corporate home office as we were not the only ones to receive it.