ACTR Praises Public-Private Security Summit Partnership That Has Achieved Massive Reduction in Identity Theft Tax Refund Fraud

WASHINGTON, June 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights (ACTR) praised the IRS in a letter today as newly released data shows that the public-private partnership among federal and state tax agencies and private-sector partners has scored major successes in reducing identity theft tax refund fraud in the past five years.

"The reduction in the incidence of identity theft tax refund fraud is extremely good news for taxpayers," said Stephen M. Ryan, counsel to ACTR, a 14-member trade group of the nation's leading tax preparation companies and the financial institutions that offer tax-time financial products.  "But the coalition of industry and government must remain vigilant in combating these crimes."

Today, IRS Commissioner Rettig convened the first virtual meeting of the five-year-old Security Summit, as the public-private partnership is known.

New statistics show that:

• Between 2015 and 2019, the number of taxpayers filing affidavits to report they were identity theft victims fell from 677,000 to 137,000 ? a reduction of 80%.
• The number of confirmed false-identity returns stopped by the IRS in the return process has fallen from 1.4 million in 2015 to 443,000 in 2019 ? a decline of 68%. 
• The IRS was able to prevent a total of $26 billion in fraudulent refunds that would otherwise have been paid over the last five years.  And Security Summit financial industry partners recovered $1.7 billion in fraudulent refund during this period.

Since it was launched five years ago, the IRS Security Summit partnership has put together an array of different safeguards and strategies to combat and prevent individual thieves and criminal syndicates from appropriating taxpayers' identities and filing fraudulent returns to steal tax revenue.

In its Agency Priority Goal Action Plan, filed in December, the IRS laid out the challenges it faces in fighting identity-theft fraud.¹  Data breaches of personal information outside the tax system are increasing the susceptibility of the system to criminals, and there has been an "increase in more sophisticated identity theft techniques. . ." coming from "new cyber gangs [that] were highly organized, highly sophisticated and well-funded."²
ACTR member companies ? who are the nation's leading retail tax preparation and tax software companies and related financial institutions³  -- play a critical role in the Security Summit.  And they have been at the forefront of the effort to combat fraud even before the Summit was convened.

ACTR has assisted in the establishment of the Identity Theft and Tax Fraud Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or ISAC, a public-private partnership that shares information with the goal of detecting, preventing and deterring activities related to stolen-identity refund fraud.⁴  In addition, ACTR has convened cybersecurity meetings at the Pell Center at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., home to a renowned cyber-security program,⁵ and funded the preparation and delivery of training for tax-preparation professionals at the IRS Tax Forums.

The ACTR letter to Commissioner Rettig concluded: "Our industry and our ACTR group are dedicated to serving the American taxpayer, and we will continue to work hard ? under the IRS's leadership -- to keep the tax-filing system as safe and secure as it can possibly be for the taxpayers we serve."   

The American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights is dedicated to ensuring taxpayer rights and the American tradition of a voluntary compliance tax system.  Its members include CCH/Wolters Kluwer, Drake Tax, H&R Block, Intuit, Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, Liberty Tax Service, Metabank, NetSpend, OnLine Taxes, Republic Bank & Trust, TaxACT, Tax Hawk, Tax Products Group/Green Dot, and TaxSlayer.

¹ https://www.performance.gov/treasury/2019_dec_Treasury_Fraud_Prevention.pdf
² https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/about_the_security_summit.pdf
³ http://www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org/
⁴ https://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/IDTTRF%20ISAC%20April%202018%20Annual%20Report.pdf
⁵ https://salve.edu/pell-center

SOURCE American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights (ACTR)