Carolina Journal’s Don Carrington continues his series on what appear to be fake tax refund schemes operating in North Carolina. The latest episode:
In this incident, Brooks contacted CJ after he found a mailing from the Internal Revenue Service addressed to another person using his address on Camden Road. He said the envelope — addressed to Ray L. Rodriguez Morales — appeared to have a check enclosed.
Brooks did not open the envelope and said he concluded that his mailbox was being used as part of a fraud scheme, known as Stolen Identity Refund Fraud, similar to the ones he had read in earlier CJ news reports.
“It is striking to know that this is going on. Until I read your articles I didn’t know about it,” Brooks said.
Brooks has a long driveway and his mailbox is not visible from his home. It would be relatively easily for a fraudster to retrieve checks without being noticed.
A CJ reporter met Brooks Nov. 25 and opened the envelope. It contained a check for $8,315. The reporter delivered the check to a special agent with the IRS Criminal Investigation Division in Charlotte.
Mark William Hanson, a Greensboro-based IRS spokesman for North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, wrote in an email to CJ that the agency “is not permitted to discuss a particular or specific taxpayer’s tax matter or their taxes based on federal disclosure regulations and federal law.”
Federal SIRF audit
A federal audit published in September concluded that “identity theft continues to be a serious and growing problem which has a significant impact on tax administration.” The audit, from the treasury inspector general for tax administration, an agency established to provide independent oversight of IRS activities, concluded that for Tax Year 2011, the IRS issued an estimated 1.1 million fraudulent refunds valued at $3.6 billion, The estimate for the previous tax year was $5.2 billion.
