Taxpayer Identity Theft — Part 13

NOTE: I wrote this post in 2013, so be aware of its age.

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I’ve been telling the story of Wendy Boka and the identity theft nightmare she’s going through with the IRS. Her husband Brian died at age 31 in 2010. Someone stole his identity and filed a fraudulent tax return in his name.

The IRS still has not processed Brian and Wendy’s final joint tax return for 2010.

Brian and Wendy were native Iowans. After Brian died, Wendy — a widow at age 29 — moved to Texas. The names are real and are used with Wendy’s permission.

You can read the other parts of this series here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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Just a short update about Wendy’s case. As detailed in Part 11, she took the IRS’s suggestion of trying to call the post office to see if they could redirect her refund check to Texas.

Unfortunately — but fittingly — no one at the post office would return her calls.

So presumably her refund check is on its way back to the IRS and the IRS will, as they promised, send the check again next month to the correct address.

I have nothing more to add. The facts speak for themselves.

If you hired the best comedy writers and satirists in Hollywood, they couldn’t come up with a more farcical script about government ineptness.

Sadly, what Wendy has had to put up with is not a movie screenplay or sitcom script. It’s the real world of how the IRS deals with identity theft.