Following recent breaches of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and IRS, Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., introduced a bill that could curtail identity theft by allowing companies to replace Social Security numbers with another identifier on tax forms.
Buchanan, a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, the panel that writes tax code, said the Taxpayer Identity Protection Act would "protect Americans from identity theft by limiting the use of Social Security numbers on the most popular tax forms, including the W-2."
Tax forms are big targets for fraudsters as they contain the personal information needed to file fraudulent tax forms or engage in other varieties of identity theft.
The congressman from Florida, which has a high number of senior citizens, added, “We must be doing all we can to end this growing problem, which hits seniors especially hard."
