House votes to punish false IRS portrayals

Bad news for everyone out there pretending to be the IRS online: party's over. The hammer is coming down. Gone are the carefree days when every man, woman, and child could run wild through cyberspace pretending to be Treasury Department without fear of repercussion. 'Wait', you ask. 'Wasn't this illegal before?' Apparently not illegal enough, since the House of Representatives voted 407-7 in favor of expanding the the prohibition against using the Treasury names and symbols online.

Technically speaking, this has always been prohibited by federal law, but the penalties weren't stiff enough to deter this type of activity. This new bill would cause anyone caught to be subject to up to $25,000 in civil penalties, as well as a year in jail. A number of websites would be affected by this new bill, most notable -- and highly contested -- would be IRS.com. The domain, owned by InterSearch Group, Inc, claims itself as the "#1 Independent Tax Source on the net." Some politicians claim that IRS.com was "built to deceive" despite the fact that on the top and bottom of every page there is a disclaimer that clearly states that the site is not the Internal Revenue Service. Maybe the government is just upset that InterSearch is stealing their traffic.

On a completely unrelated note, another section of the bill states that if the IRS discovers that an individuals identity might have been stolen, it has to notify that person "as soon as practicable." The use of the word "practicable" tells us two things: 1) Letting people know that they might be a victim of identity theft is not terrible high on the government's priority list, and more importantly, 2) whoever wrote this bill is incredibly pretentious.

Tags: identity theft, IdentityTheft, IRS