Summer Updates: Identity Theft And Tax Administration

As seen in Procedurally Taxing (September 2015)

Tax-related identity theft was a hot topic this summer.  Since I last blogged about it in May, the NTA released her Fiscal Year 2016 Objectives Report to Congress, alerting us to an upswing in the number of open identity theft cases in IRS inventory; a written report was released containing details of the 2015 Security Summit held by Commissioner Koskinen; Senators Johnson, Warner, and Ayotte introduced the Social Security Identity Defense Act of 2015; and the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing, convened by Senator Ayotte, on Tax-Related Identity Theft and Fraudulent Returns.

My previous post optimistically noted that after almost a decade of annual increases, the volume of IRS identity theft incidents finally declined by roughly 42 percent in 2014 compared to its peak of 1,901,105 in 2013. Considering the attention and resources focused on this problem, the marked decline in 2014 showed promise.  Unfortunately, the