This is the final of nine blogs in a series here at stoptheftclass.com looking at the notable problem of tax fraud that occurs here in the United States. I encourage you to go back and read the previous blogs to learn about the tens of millions of dollars that are pilfered from government coffers thanks to tax thieves.

The theft of taxpayer identities has become a thriving business. In one recent case, a Florida nursing home employee and an accomplice were found to have stolen the Social Security numbers and other information of 617 people, assembled the data in a spreadsheet, and then sought to sell it for $28,500. Fortunately for the US Government, the buyer was an undercover officer. A California man was found to have stolen personal information from a state agency and filed false returns. An employee of an Alabama state agency was found to have stolen identity information from a database and sold it an accomplice who filed more than 1,000 false returns. As reported in www.bostonglobe.com.

Who can you trust these days?

Some of the identity theft is committed by tax preparers from their offices. Preparers have filed returns using a client’s information and then had all or part of the refunds sent to themselves. One-third of the potentially fraudulent returns were filed by paid preparers, many of whom are not regulated.

A government investigation, for example, found that one unnamed tax preparer submitted 5,506 potentially fraudulent returns, which resulted in refunds totaling $26.8 million.

Get this: last year the IRS allowed 2,000 refunds to go a single address, an obvious sign of potential fraud.

Hopefully, the IRS and the US Government will get this under control. We here at stoptheftclass.com will do our best to educate those who have the impulse to steal and keep them on the straight and narrow. I would like to see the US Government subsidize mandatory stop theft classes for all students in middle school.