Phone calls by fraud artists posing as Internal Revenue
Service employees and demanding money have surged in recent months—enough so
that the IRS named phone scams the No. 1 item on its 2015 “Dirty Dozen”
list of tax scams.
The smart response if you get such a call: Just hang up. And
if the scammer calls back, hang up again, say Eric Smith, a spokesman for the
IRS, and Timothy Camus, an official with the Treasury Inspector General for Tax
Administration, a government watchdog known as Tigta.
Next step: Report the incident to Tigta at 1-800-366-4484 or www.tigta.gov. Also
contact the Federal Trade Commission through the FTC Complaint Assistant at
FTC.gov, and add “IRS Telephone Scam” to the complaint comments.
In these phone scams, the imposter typically gives a fake
“badge number” and often threatens to arrest the victim if he or she doesn’t
pay immediately using a prepaid debt card. Other threats involve loss of a
driver’s license or business license. While such callers originally preyed on
the elderly or newly arrived immigrants, now they aim at a broad range of
taxpayers.
The IRS never initiates contact with a taxpayer by phone,
email or text message. In addition, the IRS will never call about taxes owed
without having first mailed a bill. Nor will the agency require a taxpayer to
use a specific payment method or ask for credit- or debit-card numbers over the
phone. And unpaid taxes won’t cause a driver’s license to be revoked.
Between 9,000 and 12,000 complaints about such phone scams
are filed each week with Tigta. Since late 2013, some 3,000 victims have lost
$15.6 million due to these phone scams, with an average loss of $5,000 per
victim.
On an online forum, some tax advisers recently shared their
own advice for dealing with scam calls. One preparer said she hands out
whistles to clients to blow into the phone in response to phone-call scams. Several tax advisers said they advised clients
to tell the scammer to call them, or to tell the scammer their preparer had a
power of attorney.
Click
here to access the full article on The Wall Street Journal.