These people were claiming they had paid the IRS millions of dollars and were due massive refunds, but there is nothing in place to check what the IRS has actually received from individuals before cutting 6-7 figure checks?
Hypothetically someone could get these funds into their account, transfer them offshore, flee the country, and probably live out their life in a low cost of living area without extradition.
They seem to assume if there's an error they can drag the person into court, but if you have ~3 million you've changed into gold/diamonds/cash it'd be very hard to catch you...
Great read:
Everyone else: Just have the government handle tax filing
USA: loses 3 million to scammer
Everyone else: ...
USA: the only other way is auto-banning using AI
Everyone else: don’t allow unlimited donations by corporations to political offices
Similarly, a simple cross-check to see if the refund is feasible considering the other filings by the same individual/entity.
Certain refunds cannot be cross-checked as easily by a computer (eg reclaiming VAT on purchased goods). But basic refund fraud on lotteries? That shouldn't really be a thing in almost 2020.
I presume that it's how they ultimately caught them.
Overall, I think that while your suggestions obviously make sense, it's probably pretty hard to theorize like this without knowing the reality on the ground. Maybe implementing systems like this is very slow and very expensive (like everything US government does), so we'll need to wait a few more years. Maybe it would result in too many false positives, which would seriously degrade its value. Maybe people who could implement this simply don't care, because it's not their money being stolen.
If you can’t prove the assertion don’t make the payment, no matter how many months that means people might have to wait.