What the IRS isn’t telling you about identity theft
By now, we all know that income tax identity theft is a major problem. According to the General Accountability Office (GAO), the IRS paid out 5.8 billion dollars in bogus refunds to identity thieves for the tax year 2013 and, according to the GAO the real figure is probably significantly higher because of the difficulty of knowing how much income tax fraud remains undetected.
But it is not as bad as you think. It is worse.
If you are the victim of income tax identity theft, it still takes an average of 278 days to resolve your claim and get your refund although the IRS routinely tells taxpayers that they can expect their claims to be resolved within a still too long 180 days.
Read the full article from USA Today.