Georgia tax deadline extended; How to avoid scammers
The Brief
The tax filing deadline in Georgia is approaching, and scammers are exploiting this pressure to target individuals.
Scammers often impersonate the IRS via text, email, or phone calls, offering fraudulent links and threatening penalties.
Remember: The IRS will never send links via email or text, nor demand or threaten over the phone; legitimate contact is via U.S. mail.
Verify any suspicious communication by visiting IRS.gov and using official contact methods, not the number provided by scammers.
Georgia residents have an extended deadline until May 1 to file taxes due to Hurricane Helene.
The deadline to file taxes in Georgia is coming up quickly. Scammers are hoping the added pressure will make you more vulnerable.
What they're saying
Jon Powell is a tax expert and partner at Atlanta Accounting Firm Moore Colson.
He says there are a lot of ways scammers can try to use tax filing to get to swindle people out of their hard-earned money.
One of the most common ways is to text, email or call their victims claiming that they're from the IRS.
They may offer an easy way to file, and then threaten you by saying if you don't use their link you'll be punished. Or, if you've already filed, they'll tell you your return is ready, and send you a bad link to view it.
Powell says to remember that the IRS will never send a link via email or text.
If they call, they'll never demand anything from you or threaten you.
The best thing to do if you feel something may be fishy is to go directly to the source.
"If I get a text from the IRS, right, I'm going to the IRS.gov. I'm going to look and see if there's a form reference that I can look up, and I'm just going to call them and be like, 'Hey, I got a notice. Is this really you?'" Powell explained. "And they're to go, 'No, it was not us, because we would contact you via the U.S. mail, via letter, and we would have given you a notice number.'"
What you can do
If you haven't received a letter from the IRS, chances are that any communication via text or email is fraudulent.
What's important to note is that when you're calling to verify, do not use the number that called or texted you. Look up the verified number of the IRS on their government website.
Never click any of the links sent to you.
Remember, thanks to Hurricane Helene, Georgia residents have until May 1 to file taxes, not April 15. Read more about the extension.
The Source
This information has been confirmed by tax experts interviewed by FOX 5 Atlanta reporter Eric Mock. Supporting documentation was found on IRS.gov.
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And to the extent that because of the constraints and the loss of people, the IRS begins to function inefficiently or more inefficiently, and people start to complain about the IRS, they're really going to be complaining about the government. And that ignores the fact that there's an inconsistency and irony in saying on the one hand you're worried about the deficit, and on the other hand you're happy to constrain the ability of your revenue collection arm to do its job. And that obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, and there's nothing I can see in what's being done that's going to actually influence and improve the efficiency of the IRS. I think our risk, if you lose 30,000 to 40,000 people, the risk is the efficiency is going to go down. Charles P. Rettig: You need to find a balance, a balance between an oversupply of people initially with technology, and then you see how the technology sets in. You leverage the human resources you have. 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Gibbs: Are we saying that we think it's difficult, if not impossible, to hire people to the IRS? That has not been my experience. John Koskinen: Larry, I try not to exaggerate. I think this is the biggest challenge that the country [has faced] Nonetheless, I do think that there's a residual core of a lot of people out there — my experience when the IRS was in the middle of being yelled at, and as Chuck said, with not any ability to hire much. We had a window of opportunity one year, and we could hire 500 people. And I wondered, because we had no connection anymore with universities, public policy schools, and I was amazed at the number of people who said, "Yeah, I'd like to come and work for the IRS, because it would be challenging, it would be public service." As I've always said, having spent 20 years in my career in the private sector, the great thing about the public sector is when you get up and go to work on a Monday morning, you don't have to ask whether it's worthwhile. 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So, it is going to be an interesting challenge to see about hiring, but right now the challenge isn't hiring. The challenge is trying to adjust to everybody who's leaving. And my concern is we talk about technology and what's the status of the technology department when the chief information officer and the deputy chief information officer have left. And I don't know how many people underneath in IT had left. Those are all, again, the people who knew intimately how the systems, complicated systems work. And replacing them is going to be tough because no matter how good you think the ultimate system's going to be and easy to run, you got to get from here to there. Charles P. Rettig: The technical areas where IRS is hugely deficient, you cannot rely on what today would be entry-level people or less than five years. And so just take what we know, partnership tax, and multiply that times — I'm sure there's a similar thing in IT, similar thing in HR. It blends through the agency, really complex. Lawrence B. Gibbs: Well, all I can say is my friends that basically went into the IRS to begin their careers think there's no better place to go. They don't think the law firm — particularly, guys, you don't realize what's going on in the law. The alternative for folks coming out of law school, they can choose the private sector. I may be wrong, but I think in the tax area, you're not going to have that much trouble filling entry-level jobs. John Koskinen: And the challenge will be: Who's training them? How many people — you have to take experienced people to train them. And when a lot of those people are gone and you're trying to run with a skeleton crew, I think you're right, I hope you're right, that we'll get entry level people who are excited about public service. But there's going to be a gap, and the challenge is going to be what happens in this next filing season. 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Change is every bit as bad as complexity, and you're going to change a lot of the tax law with this "big beautiful bill." And that means you're going to have to train the folks on the telephone, that means the demand levels are going to be huge when you get toward the filing season next year if this act passes. To me, that's where the risk is from the standpoint of the IRS. Cara Griffith: I think that's right. There's a huge amount of taxpayer service that either won't be done — I'm decidedly worried it'll be done by technology and I don't think we're in any way ready for that. And we're going to have an expectation that AI can do things that it is not yet ready to do. And then what happens when taxpayers are given the wrong answer? What is going to be the taxpayer's comfort level with new technology, with AI? Could we see an AI chatbot? How much technology do you think taxpayers are going to be comfortable with and should be comfortable with? Daniel Werfel: Look, we've been on a journey at the IRS to better understand what taxpayers favor and can be okay with, from an automated standpoint. Let me give you an example. At some point we started pivoting taxpayers on the phones to if they wanted to create an installment agreement for a balance due, to do it through pressing buttons versus talking to a customer service rep. And then at the end we surveyed them: How was your experience? Right? And we aim to hit a benchmark, a government-wide benchmark of customer satisfaction north of 70 percent. And if you can achieve that, then you start learning, these are the parts of the tax services portfolio that will lend themselves to directing to technology, to a bot, to an automated solution, versus other things that don't work so well. And then the technology catches up, right? Well, when we tested that two years ago with version one, we got low customer service points. But now they're up to version three, let's try it again. This is no different than what your bank does or your retailer does if you're going shopping in a department store online. Whatever it is, they are rolling out solutions to test whether their customers will be okay with the more automated-based solution versus needing an actual person. And as you know, based on living your life, a lot more today versus five years ago versus 10 years ago is done with AI and with automation, and there's been success. But that didn't happen overnight and that didn't happen without testing, and this is what's important. It happened with customer centricity, right? You want to make sure that the customer is dictating the pace of how we're changing our interface with the customer because we don't want to screw that up and lose customers to our competitors who maybe have thought more strategically and more nuanced about this. So I am very bullish that a fair amount of what taxpayers are doing today with humans or in a manual process can be shifted. And the question is: What is the plan? What does that look like? And how are we going to put in guardrails to make sure that if we're using AI, some of the guardrails should be: Are we building trust with our customers? Are we doing adequate to superior levels of performance? But the other thing, and I'll pause after this is, with respect to AI, when I was commissioner, I got a lot of tough questions around pushing from both sides of the aisle to be thoughtful about AI because AI can, if it's not well articulated and well managed and regulated, could it surveil a taxpayer? Could it overreach on a taxpayer? Could it unleash a bigger version, a 1984 version of government, unless you're super transparent and super careful about what you're doing? And so I always approached AI cautiously because the stakeholders wanted me to be cautious about it. So I would invite those same stakeholders to be cautious again, because if the answer is AI is going to replace the IRS, then you have to — or the IRS workers — then you have to raise these questions again. Cara Griffith: The one concern I've always had with AI and the IRS is, if you've got an AI tool, you're going to have to input data into the tool so that it starts to learn and it can produce answers. What is that dataset that we're going to be putting into an AI, a generative AI tool at the IRS? And I worry decidedly that there could be too much data that goes in, and then we're going to get into taxpayer information. What of the taxpayer information goes into an AI tool that becomes that trained set on which it learns? And so there are necessarily, I think, a lot of guardrails that need to go around how an agency like the IRS implements and uses some of these tools that are going forward. Daniel Werfel: This is why sometimes things take longer. It's not that, if you come into the IRS and you say, "Currently 20 people have access to this data. We'd like 25 people to have access." The answer isn't no; the answer is: Why do the additional five people need access? And then can we reset our control environment to make sure that when we add five more people, these five people know the rules? So as you expand or narrow either the number of people or the number of systems that this data exists in, you want to make sure that you're doing it thoughtfully so that you're not increasing security risk, cyber risk, unauthorized access, all the things. This is risk management and IT security 101, it is really not rocket science, but it does tend to slow the process down. So if you walk into a government agency on day one and you just got your badge, it's still warm, it was just printed, and you're like, "Give me all the data or move the data to my friend who's working, and it's his first day or her first day at this other agency." The answer isn't automatically, "over my dead body." You want to go through a series of questions. First of all, do we have the legal authority to do it? And then if we do, what is the need for that information? And if there is a need, what are the corresponding security controls that we're going to put in place to make sure that when we share the data, we're doing it in a way without increasing the risk that China gets their hands on the data or some bad actor out there who wants to do something bad with the data. It just takes time. And this can frustrate taxpayers and frustrate new government leaders who've never been in government before, but this is the medicine we take in order to balance these various needs of security versus speed. Cara Griffith: I did want to talk a little bit more about confidential taxpayer information and its importance right now, particularly given the additional pings that are being done to get information out of the IRS. Daniel Werfel: I think there's a broader point here that might be worth pointing out, is that people say, "What do you make of what's going on at the IRS today?" And my answer typically is, "I don't know, because the winds haven't died down yet." In other words, it's almost like there's a hurricane working its way through and it's still nighttime, and when dawn breaks and the winds have died down, we can figure things out. And so on all of this, we are challenged with having to wait for some equilibrium to be achieved so we can kind of assess where we are, and so a lot of confusion reigns right now. And I don't envy — to be honest with you, as much as I loved being the commissioner — I'm not sure I envy the new IRS commissioner who's going to come in a high period of uncertainty and have to try to stable the ship. It's going to be very challenging. John Koskinen: I think Danny's right that we all have to wait to see what things look like when the dust settles and the sun shines. But I don't want to let this opportunity to go by without expressing my broader concern. It's [section] And together with this move toward sharing data about undocumented immigrants, it does seem to me that it's important as a policy matter, but it's going to affect the ability and willingness of taxpayers to give their data to the IRS and to have the IRS not be politicized. It's important for people to understand how significant it is for taxpayers to feel that unless there's some significant problem out there, their information is protected. And I just think the message needs to go out that at least from the standpoint of commissioners, we all understood that you would do whatever you could to protect taxpayer information. I got asked at a hearing, why wasn't I willing to share information about undocumented immigrants who pay about $70 billion a year on taxes? And they do that because they actually, if they have a chance to become citizens, the first questions they're asked is, "Have you paid your taxes?" And I said our job is to collect taxes from whatever people owe. It's the job of other people to worry about immigration policy and the rest of it. And we're bound and determined to protect the information that taxpayers give us, unless there's a court order, there's a specific investigation going on, but generally it's not our role to collect data and then share it with anybody else. Cara Griffith: Well, I think that goes to the very core of voluntary compliance. Taxpayers have to feel comfortable that if they follow the rules and they pay their tax accordingly, then they go forth. And that the information that they're giving, which quite honestly is a lot, will be protected, they won't be targeted. All of this just goes right to the core of this system that we have of voluntary compliance. So when the dust settles and the sun is shining again, what is the hope that the IRS will look like? Daniel Werfel: Look, I think there's a lot of data now on the strategic approaches for the IRS, and I think we should take what we learned from each of them and from the one that's going on right now, there are certainly some learnings that there may be a different way of doing business. There may be ways to move quicker, to break glass in a more substantial way than previous IRSes have. But from my vantage point, we need some controls on the glass breaking. So it's kind of like, I always have this vision of a scatterplot, and where do you draw the line in the scatterplot? And I think you could probably see places where the IRS was too risk averse, too slow, and not aggressive enough in moving towards modernization, and right now we're seeing the opposite. And so I hope that when the dust settles, and maybe we're seeing some of that with some of the calibration that the secretary of leadership seems to be doing to pull back some of the more aggressive DOGE actions, that we're moving more towards the middle of the graph. And hopefully, that stabilization will allow a sense that you can start — that with calmer waters, you can start building that future. David D. Stewart: Thanks again to the former commissioners for this special discussion.
