Enhance Your Finances with Expert Tax Preparation Services and Tax Security Tips | Ask My Man Manny Podcast

Uncover the secrets to protecting your finances with insights from John Juzbasich, AFSP, now sharing his wisdom as part of National Tax Security Awareness Week. Each year, billions of dollars are lost to tax scams, a grim reality that affects countless individuals, especially vulnerable groups like the elderly. In this episode, John enlightens us on how criminals exploit tax systems and provides essential strategies to shield yourself and your loved ones from becoming victims of refund fraud.

The holiday season is a notorious time for scams to flourish, and in this episode, we don’t just highlight the problem—we offer solutions. Learn to recognize the tactics scammers use, from impersonating IRS agents to crafting deceptive emails. We discuss the risks tied to oversharing on social media and the art of social engineering that scammers masterfully manipulate. Gain practical advice on maintaining your online security, such as identifying secure shopping websites, using strong passwords, and avoiding the traps of public Wi-Fi.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Gamma Tax Navigators for the 2024 tax year, an innovative move by Gamma Wealth Management to integrate tax compliance into our comprehensive financial services. With John’s expertise in business consulting, we are poised to deliver a seamless client experience. We’re committed to security, having implemented rigorous measures to safeguard client information. Additionally, we provide updates on legislative changes like the pause of the beneficial ownership requirement, ensuring you’re always informed with the latest in tax regulations. Join us as we embark on this exciting journey of financial empowerment and protection.

Chapters

• 0:06 Tax Scams and Fraud Prevention
• 3:30 Navigating Tax Scams and Fraud
• 17:49 Gamma Tax Navigators Launch Announcement
• 24:09 General Financial Education and Disclaimer

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Last year there were billions stolen in tax refunds Billions, okay, not millions and what happens is people file taxes that aren't theirs, but they send the money to themselves. Then you go to get your taxes done and the IRS comes back with a note that says sorry, your tax has already been filed and you already got a refund and you're saying wait a second, I didn't do that, but it's too late. That's fraud. So the advice really is a couple of different things, half a dozen things that we can do to protect ourselves.

Speaker 2: 0:38

The content presented and discussed is purely intended to be general and educational in nature and should not be construed as specifically tailored investment, financial planning, tax, legal, psychological diagnosis or other professional advice.

Speaker 3: 0:55

Hello everybody, Thank you for joining a very special event. This is another episode of Ask my man, Manning. I have a special guest newest member of our team I'm very excited about. His name is John Zuzbosic and he's got an accounting degree from Wharton University of Pennsylvania, teaches he's a professor at Rutgers, has a lot of experience teaching, coaching, leadership and development managed teams, help enterprises kind of look at developing sales and accounting systems, and then, more recently specifically, has been working with tax compliance, helping people file their taxes. And he's going to be the newest member, co-located in Pennsylvania. He'll be working with our team and so, again, I don't want to steal your thunder. Welcome, John, Excited to have you on the team and you want to introduce yourself, or do I do it good enough, Justice? Well, you did a great job, manny.

Speaker 1: 1:52

Thank you, I'm just happy to be here. Most people don't know we're coming to conclusion that this week was National Tax Security Awareness Week. All right, and so this is the fifth day of that week and it's all about how to recognize tax scams and frauds, and that's kind of like the topic I'd like to talk to you about today.

Speaker 3: 2:12

I think it's an awesome topic and fortunately I have people and I'm not seeing if you've seen it. I've seen elderly people come to me and say you know really softly, you know I have a problem Are they still having that deduction for like fraud and crime? And I've seen seniors get you know unfortunately get spearfished or they get some kind of issue or cheated from their phone and they're losing substantial amounts of money, and so I think there's two sides of this. There's this what we do internally and it is also what we got to help our clients do. But what do you think is some of the best practices in your end that you've seen that have worked for people?

Speaker 1: 2:49

Well, the IRS does give us some advice and counsel. I think it's important to understand, like why are we doing this? And last year there were billions stolen in tax refunds billions, okay, not millions and what happens is people file taxes that aren't theirs but they send the money to themselves. Then you go to get your taxes done and the IRS comes back with a note that says sorry, your tax has already been filed and you already got a refund. And you're saying wait a second, I didn't do that, but it's too late. That's fraud. So the advice really is a couple of different things, half a dozen things that we can do to protect ourselves, and it's to understand policies and the direction. So, first thing is the most important. The top of the list is always protect your personal data and information. You know, if someone's asking you your birth date, your age address, social security number, bank account number, why are they asking you? This? That's the first thing should be on your head. Okay, and who is this person? Are they who they say? They are All right, and don't respond to emails that ask for that type of information either. All right, no text either.

Speaker 1: 3:57

And understand certain things. If they say they're from the IRS? Well, that's a lie. Okay, irs does not use the phone and we know that when we try to call them, no one's there. Okay, the IRS does not send you emails asking for money All right, the IRS. If they have an issue with you or want money or you need a refund, they send you a letter in the mail. You get it in your mailbox. No emails, all right. No phone calls. That should be your first thing. A flag. If they say they're from the IRS and it's an email or a phone call, that's a lie, all right. So what a way you could pick up on that kind of potential.

Speaker 3: 4:36

There's another one too. It's really about what they call social engineering, where you want to help people. You're thinking you're just participating, you're just engaging. You might see on facebook, hey, what was your was. Oh, where did you go to school? Where was your favorite movie? Unless you know, like there's a whole list of people oversharing security password answers to questions and you're not even thinking that you're doing that, but you're doing that and so you know I have, and so you know I have.

Speaker 3: 5:05

I had a grandfather. A grandfather called me one day say are you? Are you, are you OK? I said yeah, well, I'm not my home. Well, I just got a message from somebody who says is your friend and you're in a Mexican prison and you need to send no money. Like, well, definitely not in a Mexican prison and I'm not a Nigerian prince either. No-transcript, it comes from text messages. Now, right, oh, who's this? You're not June, you're not this. Oh, by the way, how are you? And next thing, you know this is a whole conversation that they're trying to get to know. You get information by some estimates, some countries it's one of their biggest exports is stealing money, you know from other countries and people through sophisticated software, crime and farms of people, cold calling people and stealing things. So it's unfortunately become very, very, very sophisticated.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Well, and they take advantage of the season too. Right now we're sort of approaching in the midst of the holiday season and some of these scammers are very creative. Okay, for example, you look out as a taxpayer for a gift card scams. Those are seem real popular now. The irs never accepts for or gives gift cards as payment for a tax bill. All right, so be aware of that one. Some of these common ones that happen during the holidays. Okay, they impersonate government officials or collection agents and they ask you to buy a gift card from different stores and then the scammer provides a gift card number and a PIN. You know, they send you emails that seem like from a legit company but they're not. They pose as perhaps an IRS agent and call the taxpayer saying that it's linked to criminal activity. They harass you by telling them you have to pay a fake tax penalty. All right, avoid these tax scams. This is not how the IRS works. They never call to demand payment.

Speaker 1: 7:14

First of all, let's suppose they really felt that you owed them money. First of all, you have a right as an individual taxpayer all right to question and appeal what they think the monos. Oh, they send you a letter and you could say, well, I don't think so, okay, and you can appeal it. These are our rights as citizens, with our, and they can't tell us what to do. All right, we can't threaten to bring in police or immigration officers or any of that stuff. They don't do that. They can't revoke your driver's license either, business license, immigration status they don't have any control over that. So their thing is if they have a question about your back taxes, they'll send you a letter and you have a right to appeal it. It's real simple. Anything out of that is probably a scam. All right, so just be aware of that's how they work, and this season where you're getting these kind of gift cards to the IRS.

Speaker 3: 8:09

you've got to be careful. Or you know, I've heard seniors say I got a call from the IRS. If I don't pay them within a certain amount of time, I'm going to go to jail and they'll get very, very intense with you. And it's sad because I see a lot of elderly people unfortunately end up being the victims of these types of crimes.

Speaker 1: 8:25

Some of the things you have to worry about is not just seniors, some that work on people of all ages, for example, shopping online. Make sure you're on the right site, that it's not a spoof site, all right, and you have to make sure that the web address is the right one. Ok, it should include HTTPS, all right In the front of it. If if it doesn't, that's a problem. Okay. If it does have https, it doesn't mean it's a safe site either, because criminals can purchase a secure certificate and they do so. That's not a guarantee, but it's something to look for. Obviously, we should use security software, strong passwords. Two-factor authentication is great. Public Wi-Fi is a risk because someone could be sitting there, you don't know it, in that same hotel lobby and they have a scanner-type device and they can steal information right from the network. So be careful when you're using public Wi-Fi accounts. So be careful when you're using public Wi-Fi accounts and then, once you have a compromised account, well, act fast. Identity theft happens very quick. Those are some piece of advice. And then also be careful of social media. You mentioned social media, manny.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Social media is full of fake deductions. I'll give you some ones that they're using this year. Watch out for this stuff. For example, self-employment tax credit there's no such thing, but they have this. How to get the self-employment tax credit there's no such thing. They also have how to get household employment taxes, self-employment taxes, sort of a variation on that. Fuel tax credit yes, if you're a farmer in certain truck businesses but off-highway businesses there is a fuel tax business for off-highway use. However, if you're driving your car around town, that's not off-highway, you're not on a dirt cornfield okay, there's no fuel tax credit for you, okay.

Speaker 1: 10:25

And also one that's just blatant outlying, which would get you in jail too, is trying to inflate your income in withholding. They give you whole schemes on how to do this on these social sites, and so you inflate your income and then you inflate your deductions and you create a bogus return and, by the way, that's fraud, all right. And you know, it's amazing that people fall for this and think that the IRS computers can't figure it out. Granted, they won't figure it out this year, but it usually takes IRS many, three years, years, okay, three years for all the documents that you have to get up into the sky to the big computer that they have their systems and that's where they match things. So, as evidence of that, you know, right now they are auditing 2021 returns. Okay, because that's how long it takes for that to get together and guess what? Now they have everything. So you might have got away with it for three years, but although that's the end of the story, all right and people are misunderstanding around statute of limitations, right?

Speaker 3: 11:25

There's no statute of limitation for purposefully fraudulent claims that you go and you create on your tax returns. There's no statute of limitations on the tax year for which you don't file. So if you just said to yourself I did the numbers and it seemed like I owe something, I'm just going to stop sending IRS information, I'm going to stop doing tax returns and maybe over some course of time they'll just forget and it won't be an issue. That's not how it works. It will come back to you.

Speaker 1: 11:55

Since 2017, over 120,000 millionaires have not filed their taxes. Well, hello, the IRS is after them. Because not filing there's no statute of limitations. You have to file a return, all right. And so now they're after them and the IRS is collecting money. All right, so you can't just skip out on it. The best thing, though, you can do if you really are and I recommend this is you can get from the IRS what's called an identity protection personal information number, called an IP PIN. All right, a lot of people don't know about this, but over 10 million people have them All right. All right, a lot of people don't know about this, but over 10 million people have them. All right, and what it is is you go online to an IRS the IRS you create an account, and this account allows you to see your past returns and all that from previous years. So it's really your account and you see your information. Now, what they'll give you starting in January, you apply for this IP pin, you know, and Identity Protection Personal Identification Number, and they send you a number when you do your taxes. All right, you put that number in, okay, and then the IRS knows that this is you and it's not some guy in some other country. Okay, pretending to be you trying to steal your refund.

Speaker 1: 13:15

And IP PIN is very important. You can't do your taxes without it and God help you if you lose it. It takes two weeks to replace it. The other thing to know about the IP pin is that it's only good for one tax return for yours, all right. Next year the number's not good. You get a new one in the mail. Do not throw that letter away. Okay, that number is your number for the next tax year and it's very important.

Speaker 1: 13:40

Otherwise, you can't do your taxes without that IP pin. They'll be available, by the way, in January. There's sites there and maintenance and stuff done on it now and you can create your IRS account now and see your last year's returns etc. But you can't get the IP PIN until January 2025. So, really, in January you sign up to get it and they'll give you the PIN. All right, and they're going to try to set it for one year and the taxpayers have to get a new PIN annually after that.

Speaker 1: 14:10

But that's the best, most secure thing that anyone can do if they're afraid of their return being stolen, their refund, et cetera. They strongly recommend and so do I you get this IP pin. I've done taxes for people that have them and it's really easy. You key in the number and boom, it goes right through. I've had a situation where a person lost their number. They threw the letter away and it took two weeks okay, including a video interview and etc to get a new IP pin. So don't lose it. That's my advice there, and be careful of holiday scams, you know, don't let them ruin your holiday.

Speaker 3: 14:46

I think you said something really, really important. Even if you're not even required to do a tax return I will say the same for the first year your kids start working Because kids unfortunately, the scammers are going after their PII as well, because they know that they aren't as used to some mistakes. On most social security websites or most government websites, there's this new IDme program. When you go set up your registration for social security, you're using certain credit credentials. There might even be.

Speaker 3: 15:14

When I went through it, they I had somebody visually see me hold up my government id. So it creates this id protocol and that gets used on social security's website. That goes on, so that goes on the irs website. Most of the government websites use that id in its system, and so you have one way unifying those relationships and protecting you, because not only are people finding out that their tax returns are being stolen, they're going to Social Security and they're finding out that Social Security is getting stolen too. So this kills two birds with one stone by setting up the IDme protocol profile and a unified username and password with these websites. Even if you don't have a Social Security claim or a tax return to claim, it's good to have.

Speaker 1: 15:56

That's actually very good advice. I got mine recently, okay, just yesterday, and I've also done it with other organizations. But, for example, here's what you have to do if you want to get an ID. Me ID is you will take a picture of the front and back of your driver's license, okay, and they then ask you once they get that and they're happy that the photos are decent and clean you know, no dirt on them or glare or what have you then they'll ask you to take a photo of yourself, do a selfie, all right, and so you do a selfie with your cell phone. You know, like this, you take a selfie and then, if they match the selfie to the driver's license with facial recognition, so they know that you, the live, you, who's doing the keying in on the keyboard is the same as a person that's in a picture that you sent them on a driver's license. Once they're happy with that, then they'll do the password ID to your phone. They'll do a few other things to make sure, but you better have your.

Speaker 1: 16:53

I have my computer on, I have the cell phone on and you're using both. Ok, and it takes about 10, 15 minutes. It's not, you know, a five second job. So make sure you got 10 minutes or so to dedicate that. But, as you know you just mentioned, I agree, it is very secure. I've done that with international banks. Do the same thing, because they're used oftentimes by fraudsters et cetera, internationally. So the banks want to know who you are, you know the real you and they verify that. So to me we have to be, especially this time of year with taxes, the holidays, these gift cards new scams are coming out all the time. We need to be extremely diligent on how we answer emails, who they come from, what we you need to protect yourself or protect your personal information, and these are some of the best ways to do it.

Speaker 3: 17:45

Yeah, and I think that's good information for today. And I want to just end this conversation with the formal announcement that Gamma Tax Navigators is launching for tax year 2024. And I've been working on this for a few years. For like three or four years I've been kind of looking at structure and how we wanted to implement tax compliance and then create that process of adding that to our whole list of services. So if you know, gamma Wealth Management, we are a registered investment advisory firm. We work as a fiduciary to help people create financial plans that are objective and looking at your goals and trying to meet them in the most effective and cost-effective way of doing that and then also managing money and pitching, consulting, and so now with this tax compliance service we have three tax preparers working for this tax year. With this I want to make sure that we have over redundancies and we can take on the clients that want to do business with us in an efficient manner and then close the loop between tax planning and tax complying. And so I've seen over the years and my decades of people working with CPAs or financial advisors and getting recommendations to do certain tax strategies and then having to do a whisper down a lane to their tax preparers to figure out how to implement and record those transactions properly, and so, through one form you can work as even if you're a business owner or you're individual getting a financial plan, getting a tax plan as a component of that financial plan and then complying with the reporting of those tax strategies all under one shot, and so there's an easier handoff and an easier explanation of what we do. John's joining us because he's got a lot of experience with, as a CEO of his own company, working with budgets, working with strategic planning, buyout, selling, exit planning for businesses, and so he can uniquely work to provide one-on-one consulting relationships with business owners, businesses who want to consult with us in that way, and so I'm very excited about what we have to offer in 2024 and 2025. 2024, we're going to work with individuals. There's going to be an invite to a Microsoft form asking for people who wanted to get early access to be on our list of potential clients. For 2024 tax year, you'll get a special reward by being a part of that list for the first 50 people who waive a deposit, and then, in 2025, we'll start working towards doing business returns. So those entities, so people who have corporations, and then perhaps and then bookkeeping in the middle of 2025. I'm excited about what we're doing here. We have a great team with us.

Speaker 3: 20:43

From our side, we want to talk technology and protection of information. My first thing was to create credibility and also competency in this area, so our first hire was our chief technology officer, christopher Henderson a substantial experience with enterprise security applications and deploying security protocols across organizations. And before we even thought about bringing our first tax client, we created that Can't talk about openly what our infrastructure is. I don't think that's a judicious thing to do. But just to say that we have employee rules and permissions protocol, that only the people who need to get access to information have access to those things, and it's co-location of security. And so, if god forbid, you know someone lost a laptop or somebody had their you you're using their password on dark web and their password was trying to get into our systems from I I don't know Belarus or Ukraine or something like that would have multi-factor authentication, would stop that, just based on IP and location and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3: 21:49

We also use HTTPS and the backbone of Intuit for our tax services and tax compliance services, so nothing is on a server that we need to maintain. So nothing is on a server that we need to maintain and all of our PCs and machines are continuously updated with security protocol policies, permissions updates and that sort of thing. So we also have an annual training, aarp Bank Safe, which helps us see senior exploitation issues, talk about best practices and how to help people with diminished capacity and notifying authorities, working with people and then also coaching our employees on a proper hygiene. So, on an annual basis, all my client-facing employees have an annual training that they do, and so we will always continue to look forward and trying to outbeat and outpace the scammers. We have a security notification process. Every investment advisory firm has to have a security information technology policy. We take information policy technology policy from all of our vendors we work with as well, and then we have insurances on on and a response on what our or our technology for, whatever reason, if something should go wrong. There's, there's a backup to the backup, to the backup of the process, and so that is it for us.

Speaker 3: 23:13

I want to thank everyone for joining us and I'm excited about 2024. Have you a great holiday season and if you think of anything that we can you with in any time between time, I even have some people that were working on amendments for prior years. It looks like we're going to be doing that pretty soon, pretty shortly, this couple weeks, and so if you think of anything, just let us know. I was also going to mention that the requirement for beneficial ownership was due December 31st, but Congress has put a pause to that. So this is another part of this reason for this conversation was also remind people of that, but good news is, congress has paused that requirement for at least for 2024. All right, you have a little bit more time, but if you have questions about it, give us a call, we can talk to you about what it is that you need to do.

Speaker 1: 24:01

That's it, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 24:09

The content presented and discussed is purely intended to be general and educational in nature and should not be construed as specifically tailored investment, financial planning, tax, legal, psychological diagnosis or other professional advice. Any data cited is valid as of the date of presentation, but please know that such data are frequently subject to change. Any investment performance referenced is purely past performance, which is no guarantee of any future performance. Nothing contained in this course should be construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy or a recommendation of any security or other financial product or investment strategy. All investment tax and financial planning strategies involve risk that you should be prepared to bear. Investment, financial planning, tax, legal and other professional advice is specific to each individual and entity.