New Hampshire U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen is asking the secret service and internal revenue service to investigate reports of tax fraud targeting more than 150 health care providers in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital spokesman Rick Adams says the scam was discovered when some doctors began receiving notices from banks denying applications for accounts for which they didn’t apply, “or there were some who might have filed their income taxes electronically, to be told by the IRS that their taxes had already been filed when they hadn’t filed them,” Adams says.
New Hampshire Medical Society spokesman Scott Colby says the scam affects workers in both large hospitals and small private practices.
“I think that the individuals affected may have thought it was isolated and they just had bad luck, and that it could have been an error on the part of the IRS or maybe just somebody got a hold of them,” says Colby, “but once people started realizing that the common denominator was health care provider, and that it was happening more and more, people began to report, and that’s what we’re seeing in other states as well.”
18 similar cases have been reported in Massachusetts, and the Connecticut Medical Society says nearly three dozen cases have been reported in that state.