The IRS sent 655 refund checks to a single address in Lithuania and 343 refund checks to a single address in Shanghai.
You’d think after the tenth check went out some kind of an alarm would have gone off(?)
USA Today reported:
The Internal Revenue Service sent 655 tax refunds to a single address in Kaunas, Lithuania — failing to recognize that the refunds were likely part of an identity theft scheme. Another 343 tax refunds went to a single address in Shanghai, China.
Thousands more potentially fraudulent refunds — totaling millions of dollars — went to places in Bulgaria, Ireland and Canada in 2011.
In all, a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration today found 1.5 million potentially fraudulent tax returns that went undetected by the IRS, costing taxpayers $3.2 billion.
Those numbers are from an audit of 2011 data, and the IRS said it’s put dozens of measures in place since then to crack down on the problem.
