The submission of a phony tax return in my name was bad enough, but the frustration I’ve experienced trying to resolve the mess is almost unspeakable. The wheels of government move slowly. Very slowly. Maybe if I was some bigwig, the Feds would be as anxious as I am to track down the scammers. But at this point, there’s no happy ending, sad ending, or any ending in sight, for that matter. 

My nightmare began last March, when I attempted to electronically file my return via TurboTax, which was rejected because someone a month earlier had already e-filed a return with my Social Security Number on it. In The technical term for my conundrum is what they call a "scrambled" Social Security number.

Being new to identity theft, I didn’t quite understand at first what had happened or the gravity of the situation. When I contacted TurboTax support, the customer service rep suggested that it was probably an innocent mistake. Someone must have transposed the digits of their Social Security number, a common error in this age of e-filing, he speculated.

Calls to the Internal Revenue Service didn’t do much to bring clarity to the situation. Like TurboTax, the IRS initially suspected that the other filer entered the wrong Social Security number. She instructed me to print out and mail in my return. For the record, the IRS owed me money, not the other way around.

When the IRS failed to contact me for several months, I got a really bad feeling. So I called the IRS again for an update and advice. And again. And again. And again. The news never what I was hoping to hear. Every time I’d call, I’d get a different representative, who told me a different story, asked different questions, and gave a different timetable for resolution of my case. If that wasn’t stressful enough, everyone I spoke with had a different take on how worried I should be. One rep would downplay the severity of my situation, while another had dire warnings: cancel charge cards, contact my bank, the local police, state troopers, the Federal Trade Commission, and the three credit reporting companies. For a list of tips on thwarting identity theft, click here to check out what my CR financial-expert colleagues had to say.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do or where to turn for help. During one particular call to the IRS, though, I got a gem of a representative, who actually faxed me a copy of the fraudulent return. It even included a bogus home address, an apartment in New York City. Why couldn’t investigators just check out the fake address? I naively wondered.

In any event, many more months passed and, still, the IRS hadn’t contacted me. Guess why? The agency, it seems, had been mailing correspondence meant for me to the bogus New York City return address on the fraudulent return, not my real address – the one where I’ve lived for nearly my entire life.

I didn’t learn until even more time passed – on yet another impromptu follow-up call to the IRS – that the onus was on me to submit a formal change of address form to the IRS to prevent them from sending my mail to the fake address. Incredible. When I tried to use logic with one particular IRS agent by reasoning that common sense suggests my legitimate address is the one I’ve had all my adult life, the rep responded by saying “people move all the time.” She also advised me to stop “overthinking.” 

To keep a long story from dragging on even longer, I’ll cut to the chase. In all this time, I’ve contacted the IRS more than a dozen times, had to document I am, in fact, the real me, implemented several credit freezes to make sure scammers weren’t trying to obtain credit cards in my name, and have had a tax advocate assigned to help expedite a resolution of my case. To date, the IRS has handed off the case to investigators and examiners whose work is pretty much done, my advocate assured me. She says she’s beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I sure hope so. 

Even if, by some miracle, the case is closed and I get my long-awaited refund (with interest, but unfortunately, no late-payment penalty), I’ve still got to deal with my 2008 tax return. When I tried to e-file, it, too, got rejected. Let’s hope this time, I did something stupid like transpose the digits of my Social Security number.