“There’s a climate out there suggesting that IRS employees are armed. And that is false,” Doreen Greenwald, the national executive vice president for National Treasury Employee Union and a former IRS revenue officer, added. “When agents knock on somebody’s door they don’t know what to expect, so there have been incidents where employees have found themselves in dangerous situations.”
The only armed IRS department is the Criminal Investigation (CI), a branch investigating tax, money laundering, and Bank Secrecy Act laws. This is a small group compared with the overall IRS department. There are only 3,000 CI employees, or 3.8% of the agency’s 79,070 staffers, according to the agency’s most recent data book.
“The blue shirt and the blue jacket — those are the criminal investigation, the law enforcement part of the IRS,” Pon said. “They’re the ones who raid people’s houses. They’re the ones with the guns.”
Prevalent scamming
Typically, taxpayers who do get a special visit from the IRS would have already received multiple letters from the agency trying to resolve a tax problem. But the majority of Americans aren’t aware of the agency’s procedures, making them vulnerable to imposter scams.
“The IRS would never just show up. They would have already sent you letters,” Pon said. “If an agent is at your door, there have been half a dozen letters that have been sent to you.”
Overall, government imposter scams were a top fraud type from 2014 to 2021, according to the Federal Trade Commission. So far this year, there have been 1,396 reported IRS imposter scams, totaling $2.76 million in losses. Nearly one in four victims reported a loss and the median loss was $279.
Scammers often threaten victims with jail time for arbitrary unpaid tax bills to defraud the taxpayer.
The agency has implemented security measures for taxpayers to verify IRS worker information. Legitimate revenue officers must provide two types of government-issued identification with serial numbers and a photo of the agent. Taxpayers can also call a hotline to confirm the officer’s legitimacy. But even so, some scammers carry fake identifications, including counterfeit badges and business cards with non-working phone numbers.
“But even with these different verification things, there were still challenges to the IRS personnel in the field,” Greenwald said. “There were ongoing scammers that were out there pretending to be federal employees and that still worked.”
That’s because real agents can still be hard to identify because they look like regular people during assignments.
“Agents drive their own cars,” Pon said, “and wear their own clothes.”
Consequences of no visits
Of course, there is a drawback from the IRS pulling back on in-field agents, Greenwald said, especially as the agency has been trying to ramp up its ability to help taxpayers.
“You are able to resolve things quickly once you meet with the person,” Greenwald said.
