The 2018 annual report from C.I. is available:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2018_ir ... report.pdf
One tale from the annals that struck me as an example of a never-ending story is the one pasted below. I remember a tax seminar I went to some 35 years ago where a topic discussed was refund fraud and how much of it was conducted by prison inmates. "The more things change, the more..."
" According to court documents, Covington learned how to prepare and file fraudulent income tax returns from another inmate while he was serving time in a Tennessee state correctional facility. Covington illegally obtained personally identifiable information (PII), including Social Security numbers, from mostly other inmates. He used this information to either create false tax returns, which he mailed to his mother, or provided the information to his mother over the phone so she could prepare the forms and mail them to the IRS from her Knoxville residence. The IRS deposited some of the refunds into two bank accounts Covington created. He instructed his mother to withdraw the money from these accounts, keep some for herself, and purchase Green Dot cards for Covington with the remainder. In some cases, the IRS mailed checks directly to Covington’s mother, which she cashed and put the funds on a Green Dot card for Covington. Between tax years 2009—2015, Covington filed over 550 fraudulent returns using multiple addresses. The refunds totaled $905,213. The actual amount of loss was approximately $163,777."