Scammers are not just targeting taxpayers. Increasingly, they are targeting the tax professionals who hold taxpayer data.

That’s the message behind the IRS and Security Summit partners’ summer scam-prevention campaign, “Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself,” a five-week effort aimed at helping tax pros recognize emerging threats, strengthen basic security practices, and respond quickly if client or business data is compromised. The IRS says this year’s effort will focus on new and evolving schemes targeting preparers, core security safeguards, written security plans, identity protection tools, and breach reporting.

Why Tax Pros Are Valuable Targets

Tax pros remain one of the most valuable targets for tax scammers. If a single compromised taxpayer account is useful to a criminal, imagine how much more valuable a compromised tax office could be.

Preparers may have access to names, Social Security numbers, dependent information, wage and income records, business records, bank account details, prior-year returns, driver’s license information, and IRS authorization forms. In other words, they have exactly the kind of information identity thieves need to file false returns, redirect refunds, or impersonate taxpayers and practitioners.

A Brief History Of The Security Summit

The Security Summit was created in 2015 as a public-private partnership among the IRS, state tax agencies, and the tax industry to respond to tax-related identity theft and refund fraud. The partnership includes the IRS, state tax agencies, tax preparation firms, software developers, payroll and tax financial product processors, tax professional organizations, financial institutions, and other participants in the filing system.

By 2015, tax-related identity theft had become a serious filing-season threat. Criminals were stealing personal information from many sources and using it to file fraudulent returns in victims’ names, often before the legitimate taxpayer had filed.

The Summit’s original work focused heavily on preventing bad returns before refunds were issued, but the threat has evolved over the past decade. The IRS and its partners are no longer focused only on taxpayer-facing scams. They are also focused on attacks against the tax-filing infrastructure itself, including software accounts, preparer credentials, client portals, and computer systems.

IRS Impersonation Scams

One of the most persistent threats is IRS impersonation. These scams are no longer limited to........

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