The agency has suspended a service on its website that allowed past victims of tax-refund identity theft and some others to get personalized identification numbers. Those ID numbers were designed to let the IRS know it was the actual taxpayer filing the return, rather than someone using names and Social Security numbers that had been stolen.
Most taxpayers with identity-theft-protection numbers received their ID via mail. According to the IRS, about 130,000 of the 2.7 million numbers were retrieved online, usually by people who had lost their previously assigned numbers. The IRS offers the identification numbers to victims of identity theft and to people who filed their taxes last year in Florida, Georgia or the District of Columbia.
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