Why Did the IRS Take The Online “Get Transcript” Tool Away From Tax Payers in 2016?
IRS Suspension of Online Transcripts is going to be the biggest change to this tax filing season. For the past few years, taxpayers have relied on being able to go online and pull their Personal Tax Account Transcripts. In 2016 you will not have this option. This may make tax season a little more hectic for some. Almost 330,000 American taxpayers, both individuals, and businesses have fallen victim to one of the most sophisticated theft schemes in U.S. Treasury Department history. The theft involves the IRS’s online “Get Transcript” application process. The theft started in February 2015 but was not caught until May 2015. Billions of tax dollars now reside in offshore bank accounts.
How did this happen? What’s being done to protect the American Taxpayer?
The internal Revenue Service (IRS) suffered a four-month-long cyber data breach in which hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ accounts were compromised. Thieves tried to access the tax accounts of nearly 700,000 taxpayers, succeeding in about half of their attempts. Of those 330,000 breaches, approximately 36,000 fraudulent tax year 2014 returns were filed to claim false tax refunds. However, 23,000 of those returns were flagged by fraud filters and were stopped in the progress.