I’m one of those nerdy people who gets her taxes done obscenely early. I think this has more to do with my anal retentive, hyper-organized personality and love of office supplies than a love of filling out a tax return.

I’m ever so thankful for a little program called TurboTax (and its online cousins at H&R Block). With these programs, doing your taxes may not be fun, but it’s at least much less painful. You have someone to walk you through it step by step.

Even filing your taxes is a snap with e-filing. I’ve been e-filing for years. It’s fast, it’s convenient and you can elect to have your refund deposited directly in your bank account. (Conversely, you can schedule payments to be automatically drafted from your account, too.)

With all this convenience, it’s easy to forget that you should take caution when e-filing. In this age of identity theft – and with Arizona leading the nation in identity theft cases – you can still e-file safely. Just take steps to protect yourself.

Computer Associates reports that it expects an increase in sophisticated identity theft scams related to tax filing this year. They’ve listed some tips for safe e-filing in 2007. Here are a few:

● Don’t click on links that appear to be sent by the IRS or a tax preparation firm. The IRS doesn’t contact taxpayers about the status of their returns. The onus is on you to check the status of your e-filing.

● Double check the Web addresses of any Web site you visit. Scammers will often “typo-squat,” or get a Web address that’s very similar to a popular site.

● Be sure to check the extension name of any documents coming from a so-called tax preparer. Scammers often send worms and other viruses as “.scr,” “.com,” and “exe.” attachments.

● Use a strong firewall on your home computer. A good one will let you know when personal information is about to leave your computer.

For CA’s complete list of safe e-filing tips, go to www3.ca.com/security/.

For more info on e-filing, visit http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=151880,00.html.

Romi Carrell Wittman is a business writer and the communication services director for Trico Electric Cooperative, with headquarters in Marana. She can be reached at r.wittman@cox.net.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Local. Tags for this post: page-a02. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.