IRS Launches 2025 Identity Theft Campaign - Clear Start Tax Urges Tax Pros and Clients to Take Action
With identity theft scams continuing to evolve, the IRS and its Security Summit partners have launched the 2025 'Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself' campaign – a nationwide effort to educate tax professionals and taxpayers on the latest threats. Clear Start Tax is backing the initiative, warning that tax-related identity theft can impact not only refunds and IRS accounts but also long-term financial stability.
'This isn't just a tax issue – it's a security crisis,' said the Head of Client Solutions at Clear Start Tax. 'When personal or business data is compromised, it's often months before victims realize what's happened. By then, fake returns are filed, refunds are gone, and the IRS account may be locked or flagged.'
What the IRS Identity Theft Campaign Covers
The IRS campaign, which launched July 1 to coincide with the start of the 2025 Nationwide Tax Forums, will release weekly guidance on how to detect, prevent, and respond to identity theft. The topics include:
Recognizing red flags of client data breaches
Using multi-factor authentication and secure portals
Protecting cloud-based software from phishing and ransomware
Reporting suspected fraud to the IRS Identity Protection unit
Clear Start Tax emphasizes that even individual filers who aren't tax professionals should pay attention. Many scams target W-2 earners, gig workers, and small business owners, not just large firms.
How Identity Theft Impacts Everyday Taxpayers
Even if you're not a tax professional, identity theft can cause serious problems when it comes to your IRS records. Clear Start Tax outlines what's at stake:
Blocked or delayed refunds
IRS notices about returns the taxpayer never filed
False income reporting and audit triggers
Frozen or flagged IRS accounts
'Even one fraudulent return can take months to unwind,' said the Head of Client Solutions at Clear Start Tax. 'And if the fraud overlaps with unpaid taxes or unfiled returns, the IRS can still pursue the real taxpayer for answers.'
How to Stay Ahead of Tax Identity Theft in 2025
Clear Start Tax urges both clients and tax professionals to take the following actions immediately:
Monitor IRS accounts for unfamiliar activity
Secure tax documents with encryption and password protection
Use IRS IP PINs (Identity Protection PINs) where available
Never click on suspicious emails or open unknown attachments
Report suspected identity theft to the IRS using Form 14039
If a client's identity is compromised, Clear Start Tax helps restore IRS compliance by filing corrected documentation, resolving false balances, and working directly with the IRS.
Resolve Identity and Tax Issues – Before Enforcement Begins
In many cases, victims of identity theft also face back taxes or missing filings. Clear Start Tax helps clients get back into compliance – and may even qualify them for the IRS Fresh Start Program.
By answering a few simple questions , taxpayers can find out if they're eligible for the IRS Fresh Start Program and take the first step toward resolving their tax debt.
About Clear Start Tax
Clear Start Tax is a full-service tax liability resolution firm that serves taxpayers throughout the United States. The company specializes in assisting individuals and businesses with a wide range of IRS and state tax issues, including back taxes, wage garnishment relief, IRS appeals, and offers in compromise. Clear Start Tax helps taxpayers apply for the IRS Fresh Start Program, providing expert guidance in tax resolution. Fully accredited and A+ rated by the Better Business Bureau, the firm's unique approach and commitment to long-term client success distinguish it as a leader in the tax resolution industry.
Need Help With Back Taxes?
Click the link below:
https://clearstarttax.com/qualifytoday/
(888) 710-3533
Contact Information
Clear Start Tax
Corporate Communications Department
seo@clearstarttax.com
(949) 535-1627
SOURCE: Clear Start Tax
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
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It is not just the threat of financial calamity ― our coin coming up tails 10 times in a row ― that must be considered. Instead, predictability underpins the entire business of insurance. The sine qua non of any business is to generate profits. To run an insurance business profitably means that the insurance policies issued by the company need to be net profitable in the aggregate. To make this happen, at least three things have to be taken into account. First, like any other business, there will be expenses in running the business. An insurance company, even a captive, incurs costs for doing various things, such as underwriting policies, administering claims, managing the company, and the like. Next, there are other expenses of the insurance company such as licensing fees. Second, there are the insurance risks. Every insurance policy is a gamble: The policyholder buys the policy because she thinks some event might happen, and the insurance company sells the policy thinking that same event might not happen. But nobody has a working crystal ball or a special OUIJA board that can accurately say in advance that the event will happen or not. But here the insurance company has an edge, since it can distribute its risk among policyholders such that the odds of the coin flip coming up tails for all the policyholders becomes almost zero. Third, the insurance policies sold by the insurance company need to be profitable in the aggregate. Oh, sure, the insurance company can expect to get walloped on some policies, but on others it will take in premiums and never have to pay out our flipped penny. Thus, if the insurance company can sell enough policies, then the Law Of Large Numbers kicks in and the insurance company can then predict that if it charges $X per policy that it will realize $Y in profits. So there you have it: An insurance policy is priced largely according to three components: Expenses, losses, and profits. Thus, if the insurance company's underwriter anticipates that the expenses of a given policy will be $200, the losses spread over all policies will be $2,000, and the company needs $50 off each policy to be profitable, then the underwriter will price the policy at $2,250. Of course, the underwriter will try to get more for each policy if the market supports that, but he would be stupid to write that policy for less than $2,250. Note that in this calculation, only two elements are fixed at what they actually need to be: Expenses and profits. The wildcard is the insurance risk since it cannot be predicted in advance. The problem is found in the deviations, which are sometimes called outliers. Going back to flipping the coin a million times, in the end one can expect something very close to a 50/50 distribution, but somewhere in the middle a group of flips may come out 80 heads and 20 tails. If an insurance policy is underwritten for only those particular 100 flips, the insurance company could suffer substantial losses on that policy. This is what happens, for instance, with wind and flood policies sold in Florida. The insurance company's actuary may look at a bunch of data, not the least of which being the frequency of hurricanes, and make the prediction that only one major hurricane would hit the sunshine state every 10 years. The insurance company's underwriter takes this data and prices policies on the expectation that in any given year, the odds of a majority hurricane arriving is only 1 in 10. The underwriter would be additionally comforted that the policies are distributed all over the state and not just in one area. But let's say it is a really bad year for hurricanes and not just one, but two hurricanes show up that year, with one hitting Miami and the other hitting Tampa. Now the insurance company takes a major loss even though the actuary's predictions were quite reasonable based on the data. As an aside, it is for the threat of such outliers that the insurance companies that sell insurance policies directly to purchasers (sometimes known as retail insurance companies) will often hedge or lay off their risks by purchasing their own insurance through what are known as reinsurance contracts. Reinsurance shifts some or all of an insurance company's loss exposures to another insurance company who is willing to take that risk on ... for their own expectation of profits. The point being that an insurance company must have sufficient resources, or offload some of its risks through reinsurance contracts, that it can withstand reasonable loss outliers and still survive. At the same time, the insurance company must be able to distribute its risks over such a large number of policyholders that its risks of a calamitous loss are minimized. This latter part is what "risk distribution in the insurance sense" is all about. To say that the U.S. Tax Courts and the reviewing U.S. Courts of Appeals have struggled with this issue, and continue to struggle with this issue, would be somewhat of an understatement. Here must digress to a famous (or infamous) decided by the U.S. Supreme Court involving pornography, being Redrup v. New York, 386 U.S. 767 (1967). The Redrup opinion came in the midst of a number of U.S. Supreme Court opinions around this time when pornography was largely still illegal and the justices were struggling to legally define it. The holding of Redrup was basically that each justice would review the materials being sold by a particular defendant and then each would decide according to their own understanding whether the materials were indeed pornographic. This process became known as "Redrupping"― basically, not stating a cogent standard that anybody could abide by, but instead looking at the evidence and making a purely subjective determination. That is not what courts are supposed to do, and in 1973 the Redrup decision was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court precisely because it was so subjective. The process of Redrupping cases ― not stating a standard but looking at each case subjectively ― is what has going on with the U.S. Tax Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals that have been reviewing issues of risk distribution in the insurance sense. We can discern this from the following paragraph in the Swift opinion: "Finally, the number of independent risks ensured by the Captives is 'at least a couple orders of magnitude smaller than the captives in cases where [the tax court] found sufficient distribution of risk.' Swift, 2024 WL 378671, at *18 (quoting Caylor Land, 2021 WL 915613, at *12); see Rent-A-Center, 142 T.C. at 24 (captive provided workers' compensation, automobile and general liability insurance for 14,300 to 19,740 employees, 7,143 to 8,027 vehicles, and 2,623 to 3,081 stores); Securitas Holdings, 2014 WL 5470747, at *9–10 (captive provided workers' compensation, automobile and general liability insurance to 25 to 45 entities in over 20 countries, covering over 200,000 employees and 2,250 vehicles)." This passage is little more than the Fifth Circuit saying, "the numbers of those other cases are big enough to provide risk distribution, and this is not one of those cases." It provides no guidance to as to when the number of independent risks (also called points of risk or sometimes risk points) is large enough to qualify as risk distribution nor small enough that they do not. All we really come away with is that this particular U.S. Tax Court judge and particular panel of the Fifth Circuit subjectively thought that it wasn't enough here. This is Redrupping in a nutshell and the more quickly this "reasoning" is abandoned by everybody involved the better. Anytime the courts end up in the logical cul-de-sac where they say that "4,000 is enough but 3,999 isn't" then they have made a wrong turn and need to reverse course. The better analytical construct is to do away with this counting of risk points altogether and instead look to whether the risk distribution was sufficient that profits and losses from all policies written in the aggregate could be reasonably predicted. In other words, there is sufficient risk distribution that the Law Of Large Numbers comes into play such that the outcome would be within a reasonable standard deviation for insurance companies generally. This would not require the setting of a specific number ― which would be impossible in the insurance context anyway because risks and coverages can vary so greatly ― but it would allow captive owners, the IRS, and reviewing courts a decent framework to determine whether risk distribution is present. Not that a better framework would have changed the result in this case since there were so many other things fundamentally wrong with the captive arrangement. But it might be useful in future cases involving points of risk somewhere between these microcaptive tax shelter cases and the large corporate captives that have many thousands of diverse risks being insured. It would at least get rid of the wholly-subjective Redrupping approach currently being used which ends up being wholly subjective and substantially arbitrary, which is anathema to the legal system.
