NEWS FROM BP&S

Chris Stormer
Chris Stormer has been asked to be on a “corporate governance panel” at the annual meeting of the South Carolina Captive Insurance Association in December. Details will follow when available.

Denise Gunter
Congratulations to Denise Gunter who has been selected to participate in Leadership Columbia for 2006.

Denise is the fifth person from the Firm to go through Leadership Columbia. Ken Bauknight (1987); Chris Stormer (1988); Russell Bauknight (1989); and Beth Bauknight (2005).

Rusty Bass, who is associated with our firm, participated in Leadership Columbia in 1976.

New Staff
We are very pleased to announce that Dana O’Shields and Christian Rasor have joined our staff.

Dana grew up in the Upstate. A life long Gamecock fan, she came to Columbia to attend the University of South Carolina, where she recently completed both her undergraduate studies and her Masters of Accountancy.

Dana’s interests include anything outdoors, reading, cooking, and spending time with her two nephews.

Christian was born and raised in South Carolina and graduated from Presbyterian College in 1996 with a degree in Business Administration. He has worked in various industries, including: banking, real estate sales and development, management and industrial maintenance. Christian began taking accounting classes at the University of South Carolina and recently passed the CPA exam before joining our staff.

Christian enjoys most outdoor activities from bird hunting and saltwater fishing to minor home construction projects. He is an avid sporting clays shooter and occasionally competes in tournaments.

Seminars
The Firm will be hosting two continuing education seminars this Fall. The first is scheduled for Friday September 29 and the second will be on Friday, October 20.

As in the past, we are planning for four hours each day, starting around 8:30am and ending with lunch. The schedule for September 29 is as follows:

Time Topic Presented by

8:45am - 9:15am Goodwill Impairment Tom Pietras

9:15am - 9:45am New Risk SAS's - an overview Mike McGovern

9:45am - 10:00am Break

10:00am - 10:30am Network security issues Steve Waszazak

10:30am - 11:15am Current events in accounting and reporting Tom Pietras

11:15am - 11:30am Break

11:30am - 12:30pm Miscellaneous tax issues Jay Swearingen

12:30pm Lunch

If you are interested in attending the September seminar, please contact Tom Pietras (so we can get a head count).

Looking for Experienced Auditors

Due to continued strong growth in our audit and accounting practice, the Firm is looking for an audit senior with two to four years of recent, high quality audit experience.  Compensation will be commensurate with experience.  If you are interested (or know of someone who is interested), please e-mail your resume directly to Tom Pietras at tpietras@bpscpas.com.

TECHNICAL ISSUES

Electronic Federal Tax Payment System Cited in New E-mail Scam
(from the IRS website)

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers to be on the lookout for a new e-mail scam that uses the Treasury Department's Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) as a hook to lure individuals into disclosing their personal information.

The system, which is used by more than six million taxpayers, allows businesses and individuals to pay all their federal taxes online or by phone.

The new e-mail scam, fraught with grammatical errors and typos, looks like a page from IRS.gov and claims to be from the "IRS Antifraud Comission" (sic), a fictitious group. The e-mail claims someone has enrolled the taxpayer's credit card in EFTPS and has tried to pay taxes with it. The e-mail also says there have been fraud attempts involving the taxpayer's bank account. The e-mail claims money was lost and "remaining founds" (sic) are blocked. Recipients are asked to click on a link that will help them recover their funds, but the subsequent site asks for personal information that the thieves could use to steal the taxpayer’s identity.

“The IRS does not send out unsolicited e-mails asking for personal information,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “Don’t be taken in by these criminals.”

Additionally, the IRS never asks people for the PIN numbers, passwords or similar secret access information for their credit card, bank or other financial accounts.

This latest e-mail scam is the first one known to reference EFTPS.

The IRS has seen a recent increase in these scams. Since November, 104 different scams have been identified, with 22 of those coming in June – the most since 40 were identified in March during the height of the filing season.

Many of these schemes originate outside the United States. To date, investigations by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration have identified sites hosting more than two dozen IRS-related phishing scams. These scam Web sites have been located in many different countries, including Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Canada, Chile, China, England, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Singapore and Slovakia, as well as the United States.

Other scams claim to come from the IRS, tell recipients that they are due a federal tax refund, and direct them to a Web site that appears to be a genuine IRS site. The bogus sites contain forms or interactive Web pages similar to IRS forms or Web pages but which have been modified to request detailed personal and financial information from the e-mail recipients.

Tricking consumers into disclosing their personal and financial information, such as secret access data or credit card or bank account numbers, is fraudulent activity which can result in identity theft. Such schemes perpetrated through the Internet are called “phishing” for information.

The information fraudulently obtained is then used to steal the taxpayer’s identity and financial assets. Typically, identity thieves use someone’s personal data to empty the victim’s financial accounts, run up charges on the victim’s existing credit cards, apply for new loans, credit cards, services or benefits in the victim’s name and even file fraudulent tax returns.

When the IRS learns of new schemes involving use of the IRS name or logo, it issues consumer alerts warning taxpayers about the schemes.

The IRS also has established an electronic mailbox for taxpayers to send information about suspicious e-mails they receive which claim to come from the IRS. Taxpayers should send the information to: phishing@irs.gov.

More than 8,000 bogus emails have been forwarded to the IRS, with nearly 1,300 forwarded in June alone.

The IRS’s mail box allows taxpayers to send copies of possibly fraudulent e-mails involving misuse of the IRS name and logo to the IRS for investigation. Instructions on how to properly submit one of these communications to the IRS may be found on this Web site. Enter the term "phishing" in the search box in the upper right hand corner. Then open the article titled “How to Protect Yourself from Suspicious E-Mails” and scroll through it until you find the instructions. Following these instructions helps ensure that the bogus e-mails relayed by taxpayers retain critical elements found in the original e-mail. The IRS can use the information, URLs and links in the bogus e-mails to trace the hosting Web sites and alert authorities to help shut down these fraudulent sites.

However, due to the volume the mailbox receives, the IRS cannot acknowledge receipt or reply to taxpayers who submit their bogus e-mails. The phishing@irs.gov mailbox is only for suspicious e-mails and not for general taxpayer contact or inquiries.

For information on preventing or handling the aftermath of identity theft, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer(http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/index.html ) and OnGuardOnLine ( http://onguardonline.gov/index.html ) Web sites. Click on "Topics" to find the identity theft and phishing areas on OnGuardOnLine.

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