The number of taxpayers that were victims of identity theft fell for the third consecutive year, with the number dropping 71% in 2018, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s just-released 2019 progress update.
In 2018, the IRS received 199,000 identity theft affidavits from taxpayers compared with 677,000 in 2015.
The number of confirmed identity theft returns stopped by the IRS declined by 54%, falling from 1.4 million in 2015 to 649,000 in 2018.
“Working in concert with state tax agencies and the private-sector tax industry,” the IRS “developed a comprehensive and aggressive identity theft strategy that has resulted in significant inroads against stolen identity refund fraud,” an agency spokesperson told ThinkAdvisor in a Monday email.