Free Republic

The IRS has discovered more than 1 million Americans whose Social Security numbers were stolen by illegal immigrants, but officials never bothered to tell the taxpayers themselves, the agency’s inspector general said in a withering new report released Tuesday. Investigators first alerted the IRS to the problem five years ago, but it’s still not fixed, the inspector general said, and a pilot program meant to test a solution was canceled, and fell woefully short anyway. As a result most taxpayers don’t learn that their identities have been stolen and their Social Security files may be screwed up. “Taxpayers identified as...

Inspector General: IRS identified 1.1 million cases of The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report Tuesday which found the IRS had identified 1.1 million cases of employment-related identity theft since 2011 but failed to notify the victims. As the IG’s press release makes clear, TIGTA pointed out this same problem to the IRS in a previous audit: Why is the IRS so hesitant to deal with this problem? Because most of the people committing the identity theft are illegal immigrants.

WASHINGTON—The Internal Revenue Service may have delivered more than $5 billion in refund checks to identity thieves who filed fraudulent tax returns for 2011, Treasury Department investigators said Thursday. They estimate another $21 billion could make its way to ID thieves' pockets over the next five years. The IRS is detecting far fewer fraudulent tax refund claims than actually occur, according to a government audit that warned the widespread problem could undermine public trust in the U.S. tax system. Although the IRS detected about 940,000 fraudulent returns for last year claiming $6.5 billion in refunds, there were potentially another 1.5...