ID Theft Up 644%

Did you know that we US taxpayers have a national advocate? Well, we do. And recently National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson reported to Congress that her office dealt with 644% more cases of identity theft in 2007 than in 2004. Olson’s office fields these calls because these cases are related to stolen social security numbers.

And it seems that the IRS’s “remedies” tend to make things worse. They have resulted in freezing or delaying legit accounts and even collections, liens and levies being applied where they shouldn’t.

Basically it’s a mess.

Olson concludes that the IRS should do a better job educating taxpayers about ID theft. And that’s the right thing to tell Congress.

But taxpayers need to learn to protect themselves and not rely on the IRS. I’ve written about this before so check out Internet Scammers Imitate IRS.

Americans Holding Unreported Funds in Overseas Accounts? NO! Say It Ain’t So!

OK, so it’s not really that shocking to learn that the wealthier of US citizens might be squirreling money away in Swiss bank accounts in order to avoid the pesky tax man. It’s one of those wink-and-a-nod secrets about which everyone knows.

But the news here is that the IRS is actually going after them. It started on July 1 with a US judge granting the tax collection agency the power to issues a summons to UBS for information about these secret accounts. This one summons reveled $20 billion in unreported funds.

I gotta say I like where this is going!