Many of you know that through a sister company, not affiliated with Commonwealth Financial Network or your investment account, we prepare tax returns. Recently we e-filed one client and the e-file was rejected because a tax return had been filed under their social security number. The question was, what do we do next?
Fortunately, Commonwealth provides us with many back-office services and supplied us with an article on what to do for the client under these circumstances. The article called
What Should You Do if You Are a Victim of Tax Identity Theft?
can be found under our "News & Resources" tab, published on 3/24/2018. If you know anyone who has been a victim of this fraud, you may want to point them in the direction of this article. They will need to file with the FTC, social security and the IRS fraud department plus file a specific form with the IRS when they mail their paper return in.