Feds: Nearly 400K American Victims of Identity Theft Never Notified by IRS
Nearly 400,000 Americans are unknowingly the victims of identity theft, in cases where perpetrators steal their identity to gain employment, because the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has yet to notify them, a federal audit reveals.
A report released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration details 133,864 cases where American children had their identities stolen by perpetrators trying to gain employment, but the parents of those children were never notified by the IRS.
Another nearly 61,000 Americans were not notified last year by the IRS due to “programming errors” after having their identities stolen. As Breitbart News has reported, illegal aliens often steal IDs to fraudulently obtain employment.
Auditors write that because the IRS only notifies repeat identity theft victims once every three years, victims fail to realize that a perpetrator is continuing to use their identity.
The report states:
The IRS did not issue its Employment-Related Identity Theft notice to the parents or legal guardians of 133,864 dependents that the IRS identified as employment identity theft victims in Processing Year 2019. In addition, systemic programming errors prevented the IRS from issuing the notice to 60,872 victims that the IRS identified. [Emphasis added]
Finally, the IRS’s policy to notify repeat victims of employment identity theft every three years may result in many victims not being notified that identity thieves continued to use the victims’ Taxpayer Identification Numbers nearly every year to work. The 75,451 victims that the IRS first notified in Processing Year 2017 were not sent a subsequent notice despite identity thieves using the victims’ Taxpayer Identification Numbers again to gain employment in Processing Years 2018, 2019, or both years. [Emphasis added]
Auditors said they discovered more than 883,000 cases of employment identity theft after reviewing more than a million tax returns from last year. Of those cases, nearly 393,000 victims were not notified by the IRS, including the more than 133,000 children whose parents remain unaware of their child’s stolen identity.
“The IRS’s unwillingness to take any action in an effort to notify parents or legal guardians is problematic because of the impact and damage that theft of a child’s identity can have on future credit and employment history,” the report states, adding:
The IRS is in a unique position to identify this type of child identity theft and provide individuals with the information they need to minimize the impact. However, without notification, parents and legal guardians cannot take the same proactive steps the IRS suggests when an adult’s TIN is identified as being used to fraudulently obtain employment.
The most recent case of employment identity theft was revealed after a major Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of multiple food processing plants in Mississippi. Federal officials have confirmed that at least 400 Americans had their identities stolen by illegal aliens, including in some cases where illegal aliens worked for a decade under fraudulent identities.
Today, at least eight million illegal aliens hold American jobs in the U.S. economy that would have otherwise gone to Americans. In most cases, these illegal aliens obtain fraudulent work authorization documents or steal American citizens’ identities in order to take jobs.
A 2018 investigation by the Immigration and Reform Law Institute (IRLI) discovered that there have been potentially 39 million cases between 2012 to 2016 wherein American citizens have had their identities stolen by illegal aliens.
The discovery was made after IRLI investigators reviewed W-2 tax forms where names on the financial records did not match their corresponding Social Security records.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.