National taxpayer advocate: TikTok a difficult adversary for IRS

How do you fight a social media adversary when you are not allowed to enter its space or even see its posts?

That is the dilemma facing the IRS as it fights bad tax advice on TikTok, which federal government employees are not supposed to access, National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said Thursday at AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE in Las Vegas.

“We are prohibited from going into TikTok as a federal agency, so how do you counter a social media site that you can’t go into?” she asked. “We’re not supposed to even see what’s in there.”

Collins’s remarks about TikTok came in response to an audience question about whether the IRS would plan a campaign to fight social media scams.

“If people are giving advice on TikTok, we can’t give a counter advice on TikTok,” she said. On the other hand, she said, the people who accept tax advice from social media are “not reading a major newspaper.  They’re not going to IRS.gov and reading a press release, … so how do we get in their space and say, ‘If [it sounds] too good to be true, it probably is’? How do we get a campaign going?”

In February 2023, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to heads of federal executive departments and agencies titled “‘No TikTok on Government Devices’ Implementation Guidance.” It outlined the timeframe and steps to delete TikTok from federal devices, as required by the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, P.L. 117-328.

The IRS included “bad tax information on social media” on its 2024 Dirty Dozen list issued in April. It warned that some scams encourage taxpayers to misuse common documents, such as Form W-2, Wage and Tax Statement, or more obscure ones, such as Form 8944, Preparer e-file Hardship Waiver Request.

In May, the IRS followed up with a consumer alert about bad social media advice on the fuel tax credit, the sick and family leave credit, and household employment taxes. Although all three are legitimate tax provisions, they apply only to specialized situations, the IRS said.

The issue of bad social media advice will be a top issue when Collins issues her annual report to Congress in January, she said.

Meanwhile, some IRS employees still have TikTok on their phones, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) said in a report issued in December 2023.

Among TIGTA’s findings was that more than 2,800 mobile devices used by IRS Criminal Investigations (CI) could access TikTok’s website and about 900 CI employees could access TikTok’s site via computers assigned to CI.

IRS management disagreed with the TIGTA’s recommendation to block access to TikTok on the 2,800 mobile devices, TIGTA said.

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.