By Michael DeMarco on Monday, 30 January 2017
Category: BSSG Blog

What’s the Government Doing to Protect Your Tax Returns?

Last year’s United States’ tax season when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was breached and hackers used 464,000 stolen Social Security numbers to successfully E-file 101,000 fraudulent tax returns using false PINs. This incident should cause taxpayers to ask the question, “What’s the government doing to protect my tax returns?”

As reported by the IRS, the organization has made significant improvements over the past year in order to protect the identities of taxpayers from fraudulent returns “before, during, and after a tax return is filed.” From a November statement on irs.gov: “This is highlighted by the number of new people reporting stolen identities on federal tax returns falling by more than 50 percent, with nearly 275,000 fewer victims compared to a year ago.”

One new tool the IRS credits to dramatically combating identity theft is an annual Security Summit. This was a way for the IRS to begin identifying and implementing changes. According to the IRS, successful efforts of the summit have lead to:

While these improvements are indeed significant, any concerned taxpayer will take away from all of this that, though improved, the IRS still isn’t batting 1,000 when it comes to protecting citizens against identity theft. Therefore, continuing to be mindful of best security practices when it comes to handling sensitive data for all aspects of your business is still highly recommended.

To help businesses out, the IRS has prepared a list of critical steps you can take to protect yourself and your clients from identity theft.

When it comes to implementing many of these best practices and securing your network to protect against identity theft, COMPANYNAME is here to help. Call us today at PHONENUMBER for your IT security assessment. Keep in mind that, while death and taxes are both guaranteed, identity theft can be prevented by taking the right precautions.

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