Thanks to that stretch of the tax-code -- section 6103, created by Congress in 1976 after revelations that President Richard Nixon had sought IRS audits of his political opponents - - IRS workers can face criminal penalties for unauthorized disclosure of personal information. The penalty, as laid out in the tax and criminal codes, is up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
IRS officials invoked section 6103 more than two dozen times to explain their silence during hearings in 2013, when lawmakers asked whether people at the agency unfairly scrutinized groups that advocated shrinking the government.
The IRS’s in-house ombudsman, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, has called for minimizing the burden and anxiety on identity-theft victims. The IRS “in many ways treats the victim as someone experiencing a minor inconvenience instead of a frightening personal disaster,” it said in a report to Congress last year.
Flickering Hopes
It’s understandable that victims of tax-related identity theft would want to learn what information was stolen to guard against future misuse of personal data, said National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson. “We are currently assessing how much information we believe the IRS can provide” and may make a recommendation later this year, she said in an e-mail.
Meanwhile, Loo continues to try to get his hands on the return filed in his name. His hopes briefly flickered a few weeks ago when he received a letter from TurboTax. It was a bill, for the bogus return filed in his name, for $37.18.
Such charges can be corrected, Intuit spokeswoman Diane Carlini said in an e-mail, who explained that TurboTax attempts to collect on those bills because the government doesn’t tell the company when a return is fraudulent.