July 20, 2006 - Electronic Federal Tax Payment System Cited in New E-mail Scam
The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers to be on the lookout for a new e-mail scam that uses the Treasury Department's Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) as a hook to lure individuals into disclosing their personal information. The new e-mail scam, fraught with grammatical errors and typos, looks like a page from IRS.gov and claims to be from the "IRS Antifraud Comission" (sic), a fictitious group. The e-mail claims someone has enrolled the taxpayer's credit card in EFTPS and has tried to pay taxes with it. The e-mail also says there have been fraud attempts involving the taxpayer's bank account. The e-mail claims money was lost and "remaining founds" (sic) are blocked. Recipients are asked to click on a link that will help them recover their funds, but the subsequent site asks for personal information that the thieves could use to steal the taxpayer’s identity."The IRS does not send out unsolicited e-mails asking for personal information," said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. "Don't be taken in by these criminals. "Additionally, the IRS never asks people for the PIN numbers, passwords or similar secret access information for their credit card, bank or other financial accounts. This latest e-mail scam is the first one known to reference EFTPS... Other scams claim to come from the IRS, tell recipients that they are due a federal tax refund, and direct them to a Web site that appears to be a genuine IRS site. The bogus sites contain forms or interactive Web pages similar to IRS forms or Web pages but which have been modified to request detailed personal and financial information from the e-mail recipients. Tricking consumers into disclosing their personal and financial information, such as secret access data or credit card or bank account numbers, is fraudulent activity which can result in identity theft... The IRS also has established an electronic mailbox for taxpayers to send information about suspicious e-mails they receive which claim to come from the IRS. Taxpayers should send the information to: phishing@irs.gov.

June 2, 2005 - SSA Announces Internet SSN Verification is Now Available to All Employers
On June 2, 2005, Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart announced that all employers now have the capability to almost instantaneously determine whether an employee's name and social security number match information in SSA's database, which goes a long way toward ensuring that correct names and SSNs appear on employees' Forms W-2. For further information on verifying your employee's information, login on the SSA website located in our Tax Links to the right!