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

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5437, and I want to thank my colleague, Mr. Paulsen, for all of his work to help advance this important measure. This is a pretty straightforward bill with a straightforward mission: protecting taxpayers from tax identity theft and fraud.

I am sure everyone is familiar with a scheme that some enterprising criminals came up with to file fraudulent tax returns so that they could collect money that didn't belong to them. I am sure it is safe to say constituents in every one of our districts went to file their taxes only to find that they had been filed already, and someone else had claimed their return and their identity.

In response, the IRS instituted a smart, commonsense program to assign PIN numbers to affected taxpayers, without which they could not file their taxes. These six-digit numbers would be reassigned each year, and electronic returns would not be accepted without them.

According to the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights, it appears that this program has helped protect taxpayers and reduce fraudulent returns. The number of tax returns with confirmed identity theft dropped 32 percent from 2016 to 2017, alone, and 57 percent during the 2015 to 2017 period. Yet tax identity thieves are still claiming millions of dollars in fraudulently obtained refunds.

By broadening the IP PIN program to all taxpayers instead of only making it available to identity theft victims and individuals in pilot project States, we can be proactive about keeping taxpayers' personal information and hard-earned dollars safe, and we can make further progress in reducing the instances of fraud during filing season.

While we can and must do more to outwit cybercriminals and perpetrators of fraud, this program is a no-brainer that gives a better level of protection than exists today. I look forward to seeing this instituted for all of our constituents and hope we can build on this progress to bring additional security measures and 21st century technology improvements to the IRS.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, again, this is a straightforward and simple bill that will protect taxpayers across the country, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

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