Incident Response, TDR

Tax fraud concerns prompts TurboTax developer to pause state e-filings

Intuit – developer of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Quicken – announced on Friday that it is working with state governments to address a growing tax fraud problem.

“During this tax season, Intuit and some states have seen an increase in suspicious filings and attempts by criminals to use stolen identity information to file fraudulent state tax returns and claim tax refunds,” according to a Friday release.

Although an investigation is ongoing, Intuit said that the fraud instances did not stem from a breach of its own systems, and that the data used to file fraudulent tax returns was acquired elsewhere.

Intuit temporarily paused its transmission of state e-filing tax returns on Thursday as a precautionary measure while it worked with state governments to address the problem, but those transmissions were expected to resume on Friday, according to the release.

UPDATE: TurboTax has resumed e-filing state income tax returns. “We are taking this issue very seriously and from the moment it emerged it has been all-hands-on-deck," Brad Smith, Intuit president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We'll continue to remain vigilant, but I am more than pleased that we were able to resume transmission for our customers within about 24 hours.”

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