Government Accountability Office released a report entitled, Identity Theft – IRS Needs to Strengthen Taxpayer Authentication Efforts Large-scale breaches have put citizens personally identifiable information (PII) up for sale on the dark web, increasing the challenges of identity verification. The IRS estimates there were attempts to steal at least $12.2 billion through identity theft (IDT) tax refund fraud in 2016, but it estimates that it prevented the theft of at least.”]