Tag: Quality Alerts

Phishing

Scammers often try to steal their victims’ identities by sending them phony e-mails which claim to come from trusted sources, such as well-known financial institutions or government agencies (including the IRS), and ask them for detailed personal and financial information. This practice is known as “phishing.” The information requested is used by the scammers to gain access to the victims’ bank accounts, open new credit cards in their victims’ names and get cash advances, and more.

While we have not heard this from our VITA/TCE community, we wanted to share this as an informational awareness alert:

TaxSlayer Pro has been made aware of an email phishing scam where the sender claims to be from TaxSlayer Pro.  The subject line may read “Urgent Warning” or “Action Required”.  The body of the email is asking you to “take action or lose access to your account within 24 hours” or “we’ve updated our servers and some of your information is missing”.  This email contains a link to a site intended for you to update your information.  Do not click the link or provide any requested information.  These emails were sent from an unknown party not affiliated with TaxSlayer Pro.  Please note, official email from TaxSlayer Pro will always be sent from a TaxSlayerPro.com email address, or in the case of VITA/TCE a [email protected] email address.

The IRS has noticed an increase in the number of phishing attempts targeting professional tax preparers over the past year.  Phishing emails may use differing language in an attempt to trick an individual in to disclosing sensitive data.  Should you ever have concerns about the legitimacy of an email claiming to be from TaxSlayer Pro, please do not hesitate to contact our Support team by phone at 800-421-6346 or by email at [email protected] prior to taking any action.

How to Spot a Scam

Many e-mail scams are fairly sophisticated and hard to detect. However, there are signs to watch for, such as an e-mail that:

• Requests detailed or an unusual amount of personal and/or financial information, such as name, SSN, bank or credit card account numbers or security-related information, such as mother’s maiden name, either in the e-mail itself or on another site to which a link in the e-mail sends the recipient.
• Dangles bait to get the recipient to respond to the e-mail.
• Threatens a consequence for not responding to the e-mail.
• Gets the company or other federal agency names wrong.
• Uses incorrect grammar or odd phrasing.
• Uses a really long address in any link contained in the e-mail message or one that does not start with the actual company email address. To see the actual link address, or url, move the mouse over the link included in the text of the e-mail.

Reason issued: To alert VITA/TCE volunteers about a tax refund scam affecting taxpayers

Click here to download PDF

VTA 2018 Archives

Click here to open VTA-2018-02

Click here to open VTA-2018-01

The following was sent out by the IRS Core team:

This filing season 2018; taxpayers using volunteer sites will need consent annually on whether they want their tax return information accessible to all sites participating in the VITA/TCE program. A taxpayer who consents will be able to visit any volunteer site in the subsequent year and the site will be able to populate the return with data from the prior year. This is a two-year process.

Based on IRC 7216, if the return preparer is entering the consent PIN and date into the tax preparation software the taxpayer must sign and date a paper consent form before entering the consent PIN and date into the tax preparation software. The site may give the signed paper consent form to the taxpayer or maintain at the site. Whether the signed copy is given to the taxpayer or maintained at the site, a copy of the consent in the tax preparation software with the PIN must be provided to the taxpayer for his/her records.

Many taxpayers do not want to enter their own PIN, so we have been asked about guidance for paper consents to ensure sites are compliance.  Attached is the consent form approved by Counsel with the mandatory language for a paper Global Carry Forward consent based on IRC 7216.  Use of this paper consent is only required for sites when the return preparer is entering the Global Carry Forward consent PIN on behalf of the taxpayer.

Click here to download PDF

Blog Posted 01/17/2018 3:42 pm eastern

A production update is scheduled for deployment on Tuesday, December 19th at 6:00am Eastern. A couple items included in tomorrow’s update listed below will be pushed live.

• Minnesota – Adding M1PR to a MN return has been relocated to the “Localities” menu accessible from the main state return grid. The wording “Localities” will be updated to reflect “Property Tax Refund”

• Schedule K-1 – A fix will be released to properly save Schedule K-1 entries and carry the data to the 1040.
  • An issue existed where if you entered income, saved that entry, then exited the Schedule K-1 menu without continuing through (i.e. exited using the left navigation menu) the remaining sub-menus, the data entered as income was not carrying to the 1040.
• State Returns– The issue requiring two-clicks within certain state sub-menus to navigate forward or back has been resolved.