After years of favoring online and telephone scams, a number of crooks are drifting back to old-fashioned theft involving paper checks.
In the last year, a number of individuals, including employees of the U.S. Postal Service, have been arrested or indicted for stealing paper tax refund checks. Over $3 million of such check thefts were discovered in one New York congressional district.
Also, there’s been an increase in reported thefts of tax refund and Social Security benefit checks around the country.
Congressional representatives in New York and Georgia have asked the IRS and USPS inspectors general to fully investigate the thefts, determine their nationwide scope, and make recommendations to prevent them.
There also are problems with checks going in the other direction. Taxpayers who send paper checks to the IRS report experiencing nondelivery problems. Checks sent to pay bills also are arriving at their destinations less often.
In some cases, postal employees steal checks. In other cases, problems at USPS processing centers cause delays in delivery or lost mail, which result in taxpayers being assessed interest and penalties.
In my community in Aiken, South Carolina, this year the local police began making presentations to various groups to alert the public to the problems with paper checks. They recommend that if at all possible people avoid sending or receiving checks through the mail.