IRS, Industry, and State Security
Summit and Collaborative Effort to Fight Identity Theft
The IRS
joined with representatives of the tax software industry and state tax
administrators on June 11, 2015 to announce the new collaborative effort to
help protect the nation’s taxpayers from identity theft and tax fraud.
CrossLink
has been part of this effort for the past three months and looks forward to
being part of the continuing partnership with other tax industry companies, the
IRS, and states in the months ahead to help combat the growing impact of
identity theft to the federal and state tax systems.
This effort began in March 2015 with the establishment of three teams that focused on developing ways to improve tax return authentication and validation, information sharing between the industry, IRS, and states, and fraud detection and assessment of risks in order to develop strategies in preventing emerging threats.
The members of the IRS Security
Summit agreed to several new initiatives in the following areas:
- Taxpayer authentication - Industry
and government groups identified numerous new data elements that can be included
with the return to help authenticate the taxpayer and detect identity theft
fraud.
- Fraud detection - An
agreement was made to expand the sharing of fraud leads between industry and
government.
- Information assessment - The
groups will look at establishing a formalized Refund Fraud Information and
Assessment Center to more efficiently share information between the public and
private sector to help identify fraud schemes and reduce the risk to taxpayers.
- Cyber-security framework - Industry
agreed to align with the IRS and states under the National Institute of
Standards and Technology cyber-security framework to promote the protection of
the information technology infrastructure.
- Taxpayer awareness and communication - A joint
effort between the IRS, states, and industry to increase the effort to inform
taxpayers and raise awareness of the importance of protecting taxpayers’
sensitive personal tax and financial data to help prevent identity theft and refund
fraud.
To learn more about this new IRS,
industry, and state collaborative effort to fight identity theft and protect
taxpayers, see the following on the IRS website:
