If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I do not often weigh in with my personal opinion about the IRS. IN this instance, I can't help it. On October 3, 2006 the IRS launched the Income Verification Express Service (IVES). In this amazing example of expanding government, the IRS will now offer immediate electronic delivery of client tax and income information to financial institutions such as mortgage brokers and banks.

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Watch your inbox! That e-mail could be a trap, says the IRS. The tax-collecting agency has been one of the latest victims of identity theft. The culprits: unscrupulous spammers pretending to be IRS officials By Darrin T. Mish, Esq. ———————————- In these weird, weird times, an e-mail inbox can be a dangerous thing. Just as the Internal Revenue Service. In July, the tax-collecting agency issued a warning to American taxpayers. No, it wasn�t about payment deadlines or deadbeat taxpayers or offshore trusts. It was about spam. Spam! Spam! Spam! It seems that the IRS has become one of the latest victims of identity theft, and the agency is warning all Americans to be skeptical of any e-mail they receiving that claims to be from the IRS. �The IRS does not send out unsolicited e-mails asking for personal information,� said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. �Don�t be taken in by these criminals.� Since November, the IRS has identified 99 different e-mail scams, with 20 of those coming in June. Not surprisingly, many of the scams originate from outside the United States, including from such countries as Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Canada, Chile, China, England, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Singapore and Slovakia. In a common scam, an e-mail claims to be from the IRS and informs recipients that they are due a federal tax refund. The recipient is then directed to a website that looks like the real IRS site. But it's not. It's bogus. The site is used to gain private information about the e-mail recipient. Many people with .edu e-mail addresses appear to be the targets of most of these e-mails. Among other e-mail scams that claim to be from the IRS: * One e-mail, which is littered with grammatical errors and typos, claims to be from the �IRS Antifraud Comission� (sic), a fictitious group. The e-mail claims someone has enrolled the taxpayer�s credit card in EFTPS and has tried to pay taxes with it. The e-mail also says there have been fraud attempts involving the taxpayer�s bank account. Recipients are asked to click on a link that will help them recover their funds, but the subsequent site asks for personal information that the thieves could use to steal the taxpayer�s identity. * E-mails claiming to come from tax-refunds@irs.gov, admin@irs.gov and similar variations inform recipients that they are eligible to receive a tax refund for a given amount. It directs recipients to claim the refund by using a link contained in the e-mail, which sends the recipient to a website. The site, which looks like the IRS website, then asks for personal and financial information. If you receive a questionable e-mail purporting to be from the IRS, call 1-800-366-4484. Darrin T. Mish is an attorney who lectures nationally to practitioners in the area of IRS Problem Resolution. You can contact him at (813) 229-7100 to obtain a free subscription to his newsletter entitled The IRS Times & Inquirer or visit his website at www.getIRShelp.com

More on Victims: The, uh, well, IRS!

IRS employees could be gaining unauthorized access Gannett News Service reported that on average, 42 percent of IRS supervisors sampled in the audit certified that they had reviewed security reports showing whether their staffers gained access to taxpayer information without authorization.

More on IRS lacks safeguards from sneak peeks

The IRS is warning taxpayers to be on the lookout for a new e-mail scam that uses the Treasury Department's Electronic Federal Tax Payment System as a hook to lure individuals into disclosing their personal information.

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