It's Tax Time. What You Need To Know About Income Tax Identity Theft

Join Jim Blue and Steve Weisman in a discussion on how to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of income tax identity theft.

It's tax time and we all know that income tax identity theft is a major problem.  The most common way that income tax identity theft occurs is when the identity thief files an income tax return using his or her victim’s Social Security number along with a counterfeit W-2 that indicates a large refund is due.

In his most recent article in USA Today, Steve wrote "According to the General Accountability Office (GAO), the IRS paid out 5.8 billion dollars in bogus refunds to identity thieves for the tax year 2013 and, according to the GAO the real figure is probably significantly higher because of the difficulty of knowing how much income tax fraud remains undetected.
But it is not as bad as you think. It is worse".

Steve Weisman is a lawyer, a professor at Bentley University and one of the country's leading experts in scams and identity theft. He writes the daily blog scamicide.com, where he provides daily update information about the latest scams. His new book is Identity Theft Alert.