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:

• IRS news release on IRS, Industry, and State Security Summit
• 2015 IRS Security Summit Report
• IRS Security Summit page

IRS Security Summit

Petz Enterprises, LLC (PEI), your CrossLink Team, participated in the March 19, 2015 IRS Security Summit meeting with the IRS, state tax administrators, and tax industry companies. The meeting was held to discuss ways to address the critical issue of identity theft, refund fraud, and data security.

At the meeting the IRS indicated their willingness to work with the industry and states to discuss solutions to help combat the growing issue of identity theft fraud in the following areas over the next few months:

• Fraud prevention and detection, which includes authentication of the taxpayers
• Information sharing related to fraud between IRS and state department of revenues, as well as with the tax industry
• Data security safeguards

The goal of this collaboration is to discuss solutions that can be implemented for the 2016 filing season and beyond. As always, CrossLink remains committed to data security for our professional tax preparer customers and the tax industry as a whole.