The National Taxpayer Advocate released a report confirming that identity theft victims now wait almost two years for the IRS to resolve their cases. Two years. Not two weeks. Not two months. Seven hundred and thirty days of explaining to the same government agency that no, you did not file a tax return from a prison in Nevada while simultaneously working your job in Ohio.
The report calls these delays "unconscionable." Strong word from a government office. Unconscionable typically describes war crimes or selling subprime mortgages to pension funds. Now it describes the IRS response time for helping people whose Social Security numbers got stolen by someone named DarkLord847 on a forum you've never heard of.
Victims spend two years in bureaucratic purgatory. They can't get their refunds. They can't file new returns without triggering fraud alerts. They exist in a quantum state where the government simultaneously believes they are both the victim and the perpetrator. Schrödinger's taxpayer.
The IRS employs over seventy-nine thousand people. Surely one of them could answer a phone before the heat death of the universe. But no. The agency that can garnish your wages in forty-eight hours needs twenty-four months to acknowledge that someone in Romania filed a fake return using your name.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Get your identity stolen and you receive a two-year vacation from tax compliance. File correctly and on time like a responsible citizen and you get audited within six months. The system rewards criminal negligence and punishes victims with Kafkaesque efficiency.
Retail traders think they have it rough when Robinhood goes down during market hours. Try explaining to your mortgage lender that you can't prove your income because the federal government thinks you're both yourself and a fraudster simultaneously. At least when you lose money on meme stocks, it only takes three seconds.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Leave a Comment