The IRS has issued a warning that the W-2 email scam from last March is back and evolved.
Last year, the scam impacted the corporate world, harvesting personal employee information to create fraudulent tax returns. Now these emails have popped up in the inboxes of payroll and HR employees in nearly every industry, AND they’re asking for money. The IRS even warns individual taxpayers to be on the lookout.
How can you protect yourself and your staff? Have I got some tips for you this tax season!
The notorious W-2 email scam that plagued the corporate world starting in March of 2016 has expanded into other sectors.
Before, only tax professionals were targeted. Now, payroll and human resources employees in sectors and industries all across the board are receiving suspicious emails requesting employee W-2s and other sensitive identifying information.
It works like this. An employee will receive an email allegedly from a corporate officer, executive, or director. The name of this person will be used, and possibly their email if it has been compromised. The con artist, posing as this authority, will request employee W-2 forms. Instead of specifically requesting W-2s, the con artist may last request a list of employee information including their name, social security number, salary, date of birth, and home address for tax purposes.
Fraudulent emails tend to have misspellings and grammatical errors, and they tend to request information and documents in PDF format.
The following phrases have been reported by targets of this email scam:
- “Kindly send me the individual 2016 W-2 (PDF) and earnings summary of all W-2 of our company staff for quick review.”
- “I want you to send me the list of W-2 copy of employees wage and tax statement for 2016, I need them in PDF file type, you can send it as an attachment. Kindly prepare the list and email them to me ASAP.”
- “Can you send me the updated list of employees with full details (name, SSN, DOB, home address, salary).”
The intention of this scam is to collect enough information on employees to create fraudulent tax returns.
This year, this scam has evolved to request a wire transfer of money along with the requested information. This aspect of the scam alone has cost companies thousands of dollars.
Individual taxpayers are also at risk of being targeted by this scam.
If you receive an email like this, or any other suspicious-looking email requesting sensitive information regarding W-2s and taxes, your first step is to contact the person who allegedly requested this information. Don’t send any information or follow any links contained in the email until you confirm that it was your corporate officer, executive, or director who in fact sent this email.
Report all attempted scams to the payroll, finance, IT, and human resources department to make sure they know that your company is the target of a scam. Just because you caught on doesn’t mean your coworkers will.