Taxable Talk

The IRS sends two types of Identity Protection Verification Letters: LTR 4883C and LTR 5071C.  If you receive a LTR 4883C, you must call the IRS’s Identity Protection unit so that your return is processed.  If you receive a LTR 5071C, you can generally respond online and have your return processed.

There are three main problems with the verification notices:

1. Reaching a human at the IRS is extremely difficult;
2. Tax professionals generally cannot call on your behalf if you receive one of these notices (we can be on the call with you, but the IRS wants the taxpayer to be on the line);
3. The IRS is not following up with taxpayers who don’t respond to the notices.

Today, I’m going to look at the third issue: the lack of follow-up.  Here’s a real world example.

A client, call him John Smith, filed his 2021 tax return in May.  He owed the IRS $5,000 in tax and paid that and the appropriate amount of interest.  It was the first time Mr. Smith had ever filed a return after April 15th–and there was no extension.  The IRS assessed the late filing and late payment penalties.  Mr. Smith believed he qualified for First Time Abatement and signed an IRS Power of Attorney form allowing me to request the abatement.  I called the IRS to request the abatement (on my 10th try to reach the IRS today via the Practitioner Priority Service, I got through).  The helpful IRS agent asked me if Mr. Smith had filed his 2019 return.  I said he had (I had a copy of it).  She did some digging, and discovered that the IRS had sent an Identity Protection Letter that Mr. Smith never responded to, and his return was sitting in limbo.  Another copy of the letter is going out in the mail to Mr. Smith, so his 2019 return should soon be processed.  Once that happens, we’ll be able to request the abatement for 2021.

Mr. Smith told me he was stunned by what I wrote; he claims he never received the IRS letter.  Unfortunately, the mail isn’t perfect and it is quite possible that he didn’t receive it.  (Indeed, today a different client told me one of his past due returns had finally been processed and there’s a balance due.  I ran an Account Transcript; in theory, the IRS sent notices to him and me in March showing the balance due.  Neither of us received a notice.  But I digress….)

Let’s consider an alternative reality where three or four months after the initial Identity Protection Unit notice is sent a follow-up notice is sent (if the return remains unprocessed).  There’s a better likelihood of the taxpayer responding and getting the return processed–the goal of all involved.  And the cost of this programming change and sending the letter should be minimal.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the reality we live in today.  Instead, there’s no follow-up and it was only by accident that we discovered the issue.  If my client had timely filed his 2021 tax return, we still wouldn’t know about this issue.  IRS: It’s time to start following up on these notices.

The IRS has begun removing social security numbers from some IRS notices in the header (leaving just the last four digits, such as xxx-xx-1234). The reason for this is the problem of identity theft. And I give kudos to the IRS for this. Unfortunately, the IRS hasn’t executed this that well.

Today I opened an IRS notice that was sent to a client. The good: The social security number in the header had only the last four digits. The bad: Right below the header the IRS put in a bar code–presumably to make processing of the return mail easier. Below the bar code in relatively small print (but easily readable by me, and I wear glasses) was the deciphering of the code. Of course, it contained the social security number.

My helpful hint to the IRS: It does no good to remove the social security number from the header and then add it right below the bar code. Identity thieves can read it there, too.

…you know there’s a huge problem. Especially given that the employee should realize that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) does look at alleged criminal activities by IRS employees. Yet it happens.

Take Kenneth Goheen of Austin. Mr. Goheen worked in the IRS Austin Service Center. He apparently looked at applications for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) and used those applications to file more than 50 fraudulent returns. He pocketed over $120,000 while committing his crimes. Luckily, TIGTA and IRS Criminal Investigation found out about his malfeasance.

As noted in the Department of Justice press release,

“Goheen’s conduct is doubly offensive. He not only stole money from the government, but he used his unique position in the government—a position of trust—to wrongfully enrich himself,” stated U.S. Attorney Richard L. Durbin, Jr.

Mr. Goheen was sentenced to two years plus one day at ClubFed, must forfeit $15,442 seized from his bank account, and must make restitution of $104,292.

While it’s well and good that TIGTA and IRS Criminal Investigation caught Mr. Goheen, consider the question why did Mr. Goheen commit his crimes? Obviously he thought he’d get away with it–and that’s disturbing. No, I suspect that most criminals think they’ll get away with their crimes. Here, though, Mr. Goheen should be aware of the IRS efforts (or lack thereof) in fighting identity theft. Clearly, he felt that that the IRS efforts weren’t particularly meaningful. And that’s what bothers me here.

The IRS noted Announcement 2015-22 today, that states:

[T]he IRS will not assert that an individual whose personal information may have been compromised in a data breach must include in gross income the value of the identity protection services provided by the organization that experienced the data breach. Additionally, the IRS will not assert that an employer providing identity protection services to employees whose personal information may have been compromised in a data breach of the employer’s (or employer’s agent or service provider’s) recordkeeping system must include the value of the identity protection services in the employees’ gross income and wages.

Generally, any accession to wealth is includable in income, and there’s a value for the data protection services. Of course, one of the largest data breaches this year was at the hands of…the IRS. While this is a clearly common sense approach, still one must wonder if the IRS would have released this announcement if one of the biggest entities to cause a data breach wasn’t the IRS.