We are heading into tax season in Verona, but the headaches are more than the usual computational errors this year. Several residents are reporting that they have been called by people claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who demand immediate payment for a tax obligation. People are even being told that, if they don’t pay, the caller will be sending the police.
It’s not the IRS, folks, it’s just garden variety scammers with a garden variety tax scam. But they are annoying a lot of people, and not just in Verona. In January, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said it had received reports of some 896,000 tax scam calls made since October 2013 and that 5,000 people have collectively paid over $26.5 million to the fraudsters.
The calls go something like this. The scammers identify themselves as calling from the Treasury Department, the parent agency for the IRS. But that’s actually red flag No. 1 that the call is a fraud. The IRS will tell anybody who will listen that it never calls to demand immediate payment, and it doesn’t even call to tell you that you owe back taxes unless it has already sent you a bill. (If you get such a bill, the IRS notes, it has an established process for you to appeal the amount owed.) The IRS doesn’t ask for your credit or debit card number over the phone, and it doesn’t demand that you use money orders or pre-paid debit cards to pay your taxes.
And the IRS most definitely never threatens to bring in law enforcement, a fact that seems to have escaped one of the bozos who called a Verona Police officer with a tax threat. The officer told the scammer to come to 600 Bloomfield Avenue (VPD headquarters) to collect.
Joanna Breitenbach has fielded multiple IRS scam calls this winter. “I told him to stop calling my number,” she said. “He said, ‘I can’t do that ma’am.’ I then reply with, ‘Yes, you can. You’ve called my number once before and tried scamming us out of money, so as soon as I hang up with you I am placing a call to my local police department and the State Attorney General. He hung up.”
Sometimes, the scam calls will begin with a robo-call asserting that, if you hang up, you’ll be in violation of some Treasury Department regulation (not true, hang up), or the fake G-Men will leave an intimidating message on an answering machine. Just ignore it. The scammers, who are thought to be operating from outside the U.S. and making their phone calls through the Internet, can also set their numbers so that your caller ID will make it seem as if the call is coming from the IRS. Again, it’s not. The scammers will sometimes drop an important-sounding IRS ID number, but that’s bogus too.
Det. Anthony O’Connor of the Verona Police Department, who handles identity theft issues, says that the VPD has investigated complaints of false tax returns being filed for Verona residents, with the refund being directed to addresses outside Verona. “If somebody filed a false return on your behalf, I’m interested in it,” says O’Connor. “Bring it in.”
If you want to report a tax scam call, you can call the non-emergency number of the Verona Police, which is 973-239-5000. The TIGTA has an IRS Impersonation Scam Reporting web page, and you can also call the federal agency at 800-366-4484. But don’t bother writing down the number you might see in your caller ID. The scammers are probably not using that actual number for their dirty work. You can also report the scam to the Federal Trade Commission through the FTC Complaint Assistant. If you do, the IRS asks that you add “IRS Telephone Scam” in the notes.
But if you do owe back taxes, or think you might, you can also call the IRS at 800-829-1040 for a heart-to-heart.
