A gaggle of Senators is urging the IRS to take motion on the potential use of synthetic intelligence (AI) in scams focused at taxpayers and tax professionals.

The 4 Senators, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and James Lankford (R-Okla.), despatched a letter to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel warning about the usage of AI know-how, together with ChatGPT, “to generate persuasive, tailor-made scams meant to rob People by accessing their private monetary data.” The aim of the letter was to encourage the IRS to teach taxpayers and tax professionals about these tax scams and provide methods to forestall turning into a sufferer.

“In earlier tax submitting seasons, many rip-off messages could possibly be recognized by spelling errors, grammatical errors, and inaccurate references to the tax code,” the Senators wrote. “Against this, tax scams generated by new AI instruments are professionally composed and particularly tailor-made to trick susceptible taxpayers.”

The Senators referenced a report from Politico the place a menace intelligence supervisor at a cybersecurity firm prompted ChatGPT to supply an instance of a tax rip-off e mail containing malware. The outcome was a “grammatically immaculate e mail on the Worker Retention Credit score that requested the recipient for his or her Employer Identification Quantity, payroll data, and a listing of their workers and their social safety numbers.” When requested for an instance of a name that could possibly be used to teach aged folks on tax scams, ChatGPT produced a transcript between a scammer impersonating an IRS agent pressuring a senior citizen to pay a pretend tax debt.


This prompted the Senators to ask Werfel how the IRS was getting ready for a probably vital improve in scams generated by rising AI applied sciences, together with deep fakes and chatbots, reminiscent of ChatGPT. The Senators additionally had extra questions, together with whether or not the IRS has acquired any stories of AI-generated scams and whether or not the company has an estimate of the overall greenback quantity associated to those scams.

There was no deadline on the Could 1, 2023, letter, however the Senators famous that they regarded ahead to a response.

You’ll be able to learn the letter right here.