Sheriff encourages vigilance during tax time

As if income-tax season was not already stressful enough, criminals have come up with many sneaky ways to prey on honest folks at tax time.

Filing season began Tuesday and will run through April 18.

The Flathead County Sheriff’s Office took to social media on Monday to give people advice on how to avoid being victimized by crooks.

Sheriff Chuck Curry said the schemes vary in their elaborateness.

“We see a lot of refund checks being stolen,” Curry said.

 The thieves pilfer the checks from unsecured mailboxes and change the payee to themselves or someone else and cash it. Curry’s office recommended that folks use secured mailboxes to receive checks as a preventive measure.

Businesses can also help by asking for photo identification before cashing a person’s check. Curry’s office recommended that people also only write checks sparingly, lock checks up in secure places, and balance their checkbooks each and every month to look for discrepancies.

Other schemes have people send payments to the Internal Revenue Service to a mailbox that is located in the United States, but forwards all the mail to criminals overseas. Curry has seen people lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in these overseas ploys.

Another common scheme that occurs year-round is one where a person pretending to be an adamant telemarketer working on behalf of the federal government demands payment over the telephone. As a general rule, agencies of the U.S. government request payment via certified mail, not via the telephone.

An elderly woman recently fell victim to an over-the-phone scheme where the caller pretended to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and convinced her to send money to a mailbox that forwarded the money abroad.

“It’s difficult to prosecute,” Curry said. “It’s very difficult to get the money back.”

The Internal Revenue Service issued its suggestions in December for safely transferring and receiving money.

The organization suggests filing electronically and signing up for electronic direct deposit. The agency said 90 percent of refunds are electronically deposited within 21 days.

People who make less than $62,000 per year generally qualify for access to electronic e-filing that is free.

Tax time is often the time people find out that their identities have been stolen as they try to file a return and find that someone else has already filed and claimed a refund.

The Government Accountability Office released a report in 2015 that said the IRS paid out $5.8 billion in stolen refunds in 2013.

It’s a problem that has escalated enormously in recent years. The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s reported that approximately 1.6 million people were impacted by identity theft in the first six months of 2013, compared to 222,827 cases handled by the office in all of 2010.

Curry’s office has not seen any local tax fraud cases yet this year, but he knows some will be coming soon.

“We see it every year,” he said.

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.