The IRS Is Required To Protect Kids From Identity Theft. They’re Not Complying.
Children are surprisingly frequent victims of identity theft—around 25 percent of them will experience identity fraud or theft by the time they reach adulthood. The consequences of bad credit caused by fraud are both steep and difficult to reverse. Thankfully, the government is required to alert child victims of identity theft. However, it is failing to meet these obligations, leaving easy paths for identity theft open.
The IRS is legally required to inform parents if their child’s identity is being used to commit tax fraud. But according to Shoshana Weissmann, the digital director for the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, the IRS has refused to do so because the kids in question don’t have active tax accounts.
Kids in foster care are also particularly vulnerable to identity theft. In an attempt to remedy this, federal law requires states to run credit checks on foster kids over the age of 14, but most eligible children have not received these checks. “Even those who received any or all reports received little help understanding them,” Weissmann notes. “And few children facing identity fraud receive any help resolving it.”
The Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t make things much better. Since most possible Social Security numbe
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