If the Internal Revenue Service hasn’t notified you that your identity has been stolen, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t… or that the IRS won’t still take your money and blame the Social Security Administration or your tax preparer for not alerting you.


The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a damning report on Tuesday about the inability of the IRS to notify victims of identity theft, even though the agency “is in a unique position to identify cases in which a taxpayer’s [Social Security Number or] SSN has been compromised.”


Between February 2011 to December 2015, the IRS identified almost 1.1 million taxpayers who had been victims of employment-related identity theft, which is when someone ‒ usually an illegal immigrant ‒ uses a person’s SSN to get a job.


The IRS is able to identify when such a theft happens after electronic tax returns are filed, and the individual taxpayer identification number doesn’t match income documents associated with the accompanying SSN.


Once the IRS discovers the identity theft, though, nothing happens. The victim is not notified, nor are other government agencies. The agency has previously said that federal law prevents it from telling taxpayers who stole their identity, the Washington Times reported.

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