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Make Sure Withholding Orders Come From Official Enforcement Agency

Some scams rely on peo­ple not check offi­cial look­ing correspondence.

You are prob­a­bly famil­iar with phish­ing scams where one receives an email from Pay­pal, eBay, Bank, Credit Union, even the IRS, com­plete with logos and links say­ing your account is sus­pended or some­thing sim­i­lar until you com­plete an account review-clicking on the link in the email takes you to a scam­mer site where they ask you for your per­sonal infor­ma­tion to rip you off. What you may not be aware of is sim­i­lar scams occur by snail mail as well. Mail Fraud has been around a lot longer than the internet.

Recently a group call­ing them­selves Child Sup­port Ser­vices of Atlanta, Inc. (CSS) set up a scam in Geor­gia.  Accord­ing to the United States Postal Ser­vice (USPS)  in a com­plaint filed with the court in USPS v. CSS No. 7–09-/cv-11(WLS) (M.D Ga 9–16-09),

  • CSS claimed affil­i­a­tion with the Geor­gia state agency.
  • CSS sent doc­u­ments to non­cus­to­dial par­ents that looked like they were from the Geor­gia Court.
  • CSS forged cor­re­spon­dence to state child sup­port col­lec­tion entities.
  • CSS ter­mi­nated cus­to­dial and non­cus­to­dial par­ents affil­i­a­tion with the Geor­gia Office of Child Sup­port Services.
  • CSS threat­ened non­cus­to­dial par­ents with wage orders, arrest, license sus­pen­sion and wage garnishment.

The bold­ness of this scam is breath­tak­ing.  USPS stopped all mail to CSS, mark­ing it Return to Sender Due to Addresee’s Vio­la­tion of Postal False Rep­re­sen­ta­tion Law; any mail with­out a return address was destroyed.

Need­less to say not only were indi­vid­u­als caught up in this mail fraud, so were employ­ers who may have received gar­nish­ment orders to col­lect child sup­port from employ­ees who were non cus­to­dial par­ents; they have to pay the child sup­port gar­nished from employ­ees wages again.

Bot­tom Line:  Whether you are an indi­vid­ual or an employer check out the bone fides of any new offi­cial look­ing cor­re­spon­dence to make sure it really is a valid order.

As always, small busi­ness ser­vices and tax­a­tion are our busi­ness.  If you need help Please give Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing a call.  We would love to engage you as a client.

The usual dis­claimers: Although ABC has made every effort to insure the accu­racy of Taxes, Tips and Tools, mis­in­for­ma­tion, dis­in­for­ma­tion, changes, mis­takes, typos and hack­ers hap­pen, there­fore Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC takes no respon­si­bil­ity for any action taken or results based on the infor­ma­tion sup­plied here in. The con­tent of this blog gen­er­ally applies to busi­ness and indi­vid­ual tax­a­tion in the United States of Amer­ica.  Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice Cir­cu­lar 230 Dis­clo­sure:  As pro­vided for in Trea­sury reg­u­la­tions, advice (if any) relat­ing to fed­eral taxes that is con­tained in this com­mu­ni­ca­tion (includ­ing attach­ments) is not intended or writ­ten to be used, and can­not be used for the pur­pose of (1) avoid­ing penal­ties under the Inter­nal Rev­enue Code or (2) pro­mot­ing, mar­ket­ing or rec­om­mend­ing to another party any plan or arrange­ment address herein.  Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC cur­rently does not have a cer­ti­fied pub­lic accoun­tant, human resource spe­cial­ist, cer­ti­fied finan­cial plan­ner or an attor­ney on staff; this infor­ma­tion is purely for edu­ca­tional pur­poses and not to be con­strued as legal or finan­cial advice. Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC and its employ­ees, mem­bers and asso­ciates are not engage to prac­tice law; you always should dis­cuss legal mat­ters with your attor­ney before talk­ing to any­one else.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 12:36 am and is filed under General Business, General Individual, HR Info, Other Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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