Tax pros becoming big target of pfishing
ID crooks and hackers are doing an end-run around you by targeting your tax pro with what the Internal Revenue Service calls a phishing epidemic.
According to the IRS, 177 tax professionals or firms reported data thefts involving client information relating to thousands of tax filers from January through May. The IRS said it is receiving three to five data theft reports a week from those who prepare taxes.
Not all the data breaches involve phishing. But the IRS has spotted enough trouble that the agency is conducting a campaign called “Don’t Take the Bait” to educate tax professionals about the need for extra care.
Think about it: We hand all sorts of data over to our accountants and tax professionals each year — bank account numbers for direct deposit information, Social Security numbers for our children, the names of the places where we bank or invest.
Tax files can hold all sorts of data that can be used by hackers or sold on the dark web.
“Either they use it or they will sell it,” said Luis D. Garcia, an IRS spokesman in Detroit.
ID thieves, like other con artists, tend to do their homework to seem legitimate and quite convincing the first time they send a scam email, Garcia said.
Fraudsters can do research via social media and other sites to better craft their pitches.
Joseph DeGennaro, tax director for Doeren Mayhew in Troy, Mich., said he recently attended a joint conference with the IRS and the Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants.
“And every topic segued into cybersecurity and identity theft issues,” DeGennaro said.
Scams can vary. In some cases, an email can be disguised to look like it is an alert from a tax client, a potential client or a tax software vendor.
“They send you an email and they say we have this tax software we’d like you to try. ‘Please click here,’ ” said Audrey M. Victor, senior manager and certified public accountant for Rehmann Robson in Troy. By clicking here, though, you’re often taking the first step to having some data compromised.
What’s interesting is that more people open those links or attachments than you might expect.
The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report warned that in general, one in 14 users is tricked into opening a link or attachment from a phishing email. A quarter of the victims have been duped more than once.
In some complex cases, it’s possible to use tax form data and earlier invoices in a scam to get a business to wire money to con artists who are pretending to collect on another bill.
In some cases, the ID thieves can send an email, pretending to be the legitimate client, and request that their income tax refund be directly deposited into a different account.
Internal Revenue Commissioner John Koskinen said national and international cybercrime rings are targeting the tax professionals and businesses.
“We urge the tax professional community: Beware your inbox. Don’t take the bait from these phishing scams,” Koskinen said in a statement.
While tax professionals take protecting data seriously, Koskinen’s statement indicated that many still “overlook basic security steps.”
“Doing nothing or making a minimal effort is no longer an option,” he said.
The historic transformation of the automobile industry will generate billions to trillions of dollars for companies and investors. But for traditional automakers, the road ahead will be bumpy, risky and expensive.
That’s the assessment of consulting firm AlixPartners, which released a report this month that uses market research and consumer surveys to lay out some of the major challenges facing automakers — with some interesting findings about Tesla.
The report includes a near-term industry outlook with a darker forecast for U.S. auto sales than most other prognosticators have put forth.
Record-high vehicle sales in 2016 will dive 13 percent from 2017 through 2019, the firm predicted — to 15.2 million vehicles from 17.5 million — in what it calls a cyclical but ill-timed downturn made worse by a “used car time bomb” as hundreds of thousands of vehicles come off lease all at once.
“That increased used car supply reduces used car prices and pulls sales from new to used,” said Mark Wakefield, who heads the automotive practice at AlixPartners. About a third of vehicles are leased, not sold, with a typical lease period of three years.
The downturn is ill-timed, the report said, because impending industry upheaval is forcing major new capital commitments, unfamiliar new partnerships and fundamental shifts in strategy for a future of driverless electrified cars that may be shared and not owned — all this while trying to run a traditional internal combustion car business as the world changes.
“They’re moving toward something that doesn’t connect with 99.9 percent of the business that’s generating good cash flow now,” Wakefield said.
Deciding what to invest in while maintaining enough flexibility to shift with unpredictable turns in technology and the marketplace will be a real trick, he said.
For example, Wakefield said, “the flattening out of car sharing is a great example of just how uncertain the world is.”
A few years ago, car sharing companies such as Zipcar, Car2go, Enterprise CarShare and others, which let users rent cars hours at a time, looked set to take off, with great expansion plans and high brand awareness. But that business peaked in 2014, the report said, and brand awareness is fading fast. A 2013 survey by the firm in 10 major cities showed just 4 percent of respondents had never heard of any of the listed car-sharing companies; in this year’s survey, 21 percent had never heard of Zipcar, Car2go or any of the others.
The reason: Uber and Lyft. “They got sidelined as ride sharing became a thing,” he said. “Five years ago it looked like the next great thing, now it doesn’t look so critical.”
Electric cars inject even more uncertainty. Sales are growing but the base is tiny in the U.S. Despite rich federal and state incentives, they still represent less than 1 percent of the nation’s automobile market.
Yet they’re taking off fast in China and Europe. Last year, the report said, about 350,000 plug-in cars were sold in China, up 84 percent from the previous year and almost twice as many as in the U.S. And while foreign automakers account for the majority of total auto sales in China, the report said 96 percent of those electric cars are made by Chinese companies.
“The Chinese government is saying this is our chance to leapfrog the industry and take a commanding position in a growing space,” Wakefield said.
That applies to the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars as well: China’s battery manufacturing capacity is growing twice as fast as any other country’s, the report said, never mind Tesla’s $5 billion Nevada “Gigafactory” battery plant.
Meantime, the industry faces the prospect of driverless cars. Every major auto company has already made significant investments in the field, such as Ford’s $1 billion purchase of Argo AI and GM’s acquisition of Cruise Automation, which are aimed at trying to avoid getting rolled over by the likes of Google, Apple and China’s Baidu.