Tax season may be over, but next year’s taxes will be due before we know it—and at least 1.4 million Americans won’t know that their Social Security numbers are being used by illegal aliens. An Internal Revenue Service report that this is roughly the number of illegal aliens who are impersonating citizens when it comes to file taxes. To make things more maddening, they’re not allowed to work with the Department of Homeland Security on finding the identities of these people. Stephen Dinan at The Washington Times had more:
Most illegal immigrants who pay taxes have stolen someone else’s legal identity, and the IRS doesn’t do a very good job of letting those American citizens and legal immigrants know they’re being impersonated, the tax agency’s inspector general said in a new report released Thursday.
[…]
“Cases of employment identity theft can cause significant burden to innocent taxpayers, including the incorrect computation of taxes based on income that does not belong to them,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general.
It’s long been a conundrum in the federal government.
The IRS knows of 2.4 million people a year who file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, which is generally given out to immigrants who aren’t authorized to work. But the IRS is not allowed to talk with Homeland Security to help agents identify who and where those taxpayers are.
[…]
The migrants file their forms with their ITINs, but the W-2 forms they submit show valid Social Security numbers that they fraudulently gave to their employer to clear an initial work authorization check.
A staggering 87 percent of forms filed online using ITINs showed income credited to a Social Security number. More than half of forms filed by paper also showed that same fraudulent behavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment