Requiring Secretary of the Treasury to Establish A Program for the Issuance of Identity Protection Personal Identification Numbers

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAULSEN. 5437, currently under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5437, legislation that I am coauthoring with my colleague, Congresswoman DelBene from Washington State, that will tackle identity theft.

Each year the IRS processes over 240 million tax returns and issues more than $400 billion in refunds. This makes tax season a prime target for identity thieves who steal billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers by filing false returns. It is all too common.

More than 1.8 million people, including more than 13,000 Minnesotans were victims of tax identify theft in 2015, and in just the first 2 months of 2016, the filing season, the IRS identified more than 31,000 fraudulent returns with thousands more surely slipping through the cracks.

A Government Accountability Office report last year found that scammers attempted to claim $14.5 billion in fraudulent tax returns in the 2015 tax season alone. For a criminal, the scam is simple and straightforward. You steal a taxpayer's Social Security number; you file a fraudulent return in their name; and then you collect the refund.

While this is a tremendous theft of taxpayer dollars, it is also a nightmare for victims who then have to work to clear their name with multiple government agencies and wait longer to receive their own tax refund.

Our seniors, in particular, are very vulnerable to identity theft, as they then have to struggle to navigate a bureaucratic maze to clear their name and then file an authentic return. There is one tool available though to some taxpayers that makes this scam a lot harder to pull this off. It is called an identity protection PIN, or an IP PIN. It is a 6-digit number that is issued by the IRS to help the IRS then authenticate a tax return and validate the identity of the person who is filing it.

Today, IP PINs are available only in a couple of States and the District of Columbia, as well as to certain taxpayers who might be at high risk of identity theft.

This legislation today which we are taking up would expand this program by giving all taxpayers access and the option of signing up for an IP PIN over the course of the next 5 years as they phase this in. This will give all taxpayers peace of mind by allowing them to proactively protect their own identity from tax scammers, and it will save taxpayer dollars by preventing fraud that puts refunds into the wrong hands.

Mr. Speaker, as a reminder, next year, taxpayers will enjoy a very simplified and streamlined tax filing process that allows all hardworking Americans to keep more of their own hard-earned dollars. However, there is still a lot that needs to be done to help protect taxpayers by cracking down on identity theft, which is becoming more and more prevalent. This is a very commonsense, straightforward bill that will help tackle identity theft.

I want to thank not only Chairman Brady for his leadership on some of the IRS reform efforts, but also my colleague Congresswoman DelBene for partnering up on this issue as well.

It is very common sense; it is bipartisan. By giving taxpayers who are at risk of identity theft the opportunity to request that PIN number, it will allow them to make sure that their tax return is safe, secure, and authentic.

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