IRS IP (Identity Protection) PIN

This is more speculative than most of my answers here, but the IRS instructions say that the mobile phone has to be registered in your name. This may be different than the phone _number_ being registered in your name.

Some other government agencies, such as Social Security and Medicare, use the same information that the credit agencies use to verify your identity when requesting a credit report, and the mobile phone is only for two factor authorization. The IRS apparently chose a different system.

My tax credentials are irrelevant to this reply, so I've omitted them from the .signature.

-- Arthur L. Rubin, Brea, CA

Do you have a link to those instructions? I have used the same carrier for a couple of decades and have always purchased my phones directly from them so I assume my current phone as well as my phone number are registered in my name, the same name that is on my income tax returns.

Expanding on Arthur's response, who is the owner of your cell phone account? For instance, if your cell phone number is owned by your business, it could fail the IRS check. If you are part of a family plan and your name isn't the primary name on the account, it might fail. If there is a typo in your name in the carrier's database, it might fail.

At this point, your best bet may be to wait for the IRS to resume operations and request an activation code by mail. Many operations are scheduled to begin again on or about June 15.

Ira Smilovitz, EA Leonia, NJ

On Sunday, June 7, 2020 at 12:29:33 AM UTC-4, ira smilovitz wrote: > Expanding on Arthur's response, who is the owner of your cell phone account? For instance, if your cell phone number is owned by your business, it could fail the IRS check. If you are part of a family plan and your name isn't the primary name on the account, it might fail. If there is a typo in your name in the carrier's database, it might fail.

I am the owner of the account. My name is the primary name. I've verified my name and address with the carrier. I think, as you suggest, that I will just wait until operations resume at the IRS. My understanding is that if the mobile phone verification fails they will send the actual PIN (not a verification code ?) by paper mail. I realized that even if I were to successfully verify my mobile phone number, my spouse would not be able to as we have a family plan with my name as primary on the account (we file jointly).

But if anyone has a link to exactly what the IRS is trying to "verify" with a mobile phone number, that would be of interest.

Thanks.

The IRS uses two-factor authorization to identify "you" as the proper person to access or receive any information related to your tax account. If they send an authorization code to the wrong phone number (that is, a phone that doesn't belong to you), it defeats the purpose of two factor authorization.

Ira Smilovitz, EA Leonia, NJ

Interesting, as the financial institutions where I have set up two-factor authorization did not, to my knowledge, "verify" that the mobile phone number I gave them was indeed mine. So it sounds like the IRS is being more cautious, which is fine except that the verification process is not explained and there is no reason I know of that my phone number would not be verified. I have even called my carrier three times to try to figure this out.

As you suggested, I guess I'll just wait until the IRS resumes operations so that I could either talk to someone about this or go through the process again and initiate the paper mail option.

The bank's threat model is different. When you set up your PIN, they presumably already had reason to believe you are who you say you are.

For the IRS, you're some random person showing up on the web site, who might be you or might be a crook, so I can't blame them for being more sceptical. No idea why they have trouble linking you to your cell phone, though. My phone is a Tracfone prepaid so I wouldn't even try.

Actually, the IRS procedure involves providing a lot of information including financial information that they confirm using Experian. They also send a code to the email address you provide to verify it. At that point in the process they should more than reasonably believe who I am and what my email address is. It's just the very last step that fails - when they ask for a mobile phone number and try to "verify" it. Why not just send the code to the phone to verify it's my number, as they did with the email address?

I'm glad that they are skeptical about who is applying for the PIN, but I wish they were more transparent about how they "verify" the mobile phone number because in my case it always fails for no apparent reason.

Is the name on your phone EXACTLY the same as in the IRS records? Even down to the period after your middle initial? They are not thinking, they are using computers.

I have no middle initial.

The name on my carrier account matches the name on my tax returns. In some places I read that the IRS is checking the caller ID. I changed that to exactly match my name and that still didn't help.

If you're getting a pin as a tax professional, the IRS may want you to have a separate business phone and not use a personal phone line. A comment by an IRS auditor a while ago gave me the impression that having business phones (if you deduct any phone charges) is an issue with them.

My daughter had a similar issue when she requested copies of her tax returns from the IRS. All of the identity checks passed fine except for the cell phone validation. Like you, her name on her cell phone account was spelled exactly the same as on tax records, as was the address. In this case, we concluded that the problem might have been that at one time when she was a minor and first got her cell phone number, the phone account was owned by me and she was part of a family plan. But after she became an adult, she set up her own account and had the phone number transferred. Even though the account is now legally hers and in her name, maybe the IRS somehow tapped into old records when she was part of our family plan. In any case, she received the pin number a couple days later in the postal mail, so it wasn't a big deal.

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I'm not a tax professional.