Cybercriminals Love Tax Season – Here’s How To Protect Your Business
Tax season is the most dangerous stretch of the year for business email fraud, and the defense comes down to five moves: train your team on current scams, encrypt document exchanges, require multi-factor authentication on financial systems, audit your security before filing crunch hits, and verify every payment request through a second channel. Do those five and you’ve neutralized the vast majority of tax season attacks.
Why this season specifically? Because everything criminals need lines up at once between January and April. Sensitive financial data is flying between your office, your CPA, and your payroll provider. Deadlines have everyone rushing. Inboxes are flooded with forms and payment requests, so one more “urgent” email doesn’t stand out. Attackers know all of this and time their campaigns accordingly.
Why Does Tax Season Give Attackers an Edge?
Four conditions converge:
- More sensitive data in motion. W-2s, financial statements, and account details are being emailed and uploaded constantly, and every exchange is a chance for interception or a convincing fake.
- Deadline pressure breeds mistakes. An employee racing a filing date is far less likely to scrutinize a sender address or hover over a link before clicking.
- Email volume provides cover. When your bookkeeper legitimately sends five document requests a week, the sixth one, the fraudulent one, blends right in.
- Trusted names are easy to fake. Impersonating the IRS, a tax prep service, or your own accountant gives an attacker instant credibility. Remember that the real IRS initiates contact by mail, not by email, text, or phone demanding immediate payment.
What Scams Should You Expect Between Now and April?
- Phishing emails posing as the IRS, your CPA, or tax software, asking you to “verify” information or open an attached “notice”
- Fake invoices and payment requests, often referencing real vendor names, designed to get a wire out the door before anyone checks
- Ransomware timed for maximum leverage, because attackers know you’ll consider paying when your financial records are encrypted a week before the deadline
- Social engineering calls from someone claiming to be your payroll provider or accountant, fishing for credentials or account details
W-2 fraud deserves special mention: a spoofed email “from the CEO” asking HR for all employee W-2s hands an attacker your entire staff’s identities in one reply.
How Do You Protect Your Business This Tax Season?
1. Train your team now, not after an incident
A short refresher beats an annual seminar. Cover the current scams above and drill three behaviors: verify senders before opening attachments, treat urgent payment requests as automatic red flags, and report anything suspicious immediately. Ongoing awareness training is a standard part of managed cybersecurity services for exactly this reason.
2. Stop emailing tax documents
Email is not a secure transport for W-2s and financial statements. Use an encrypted portal or secure file sharing tool with your CPA and payroll provider. If a document absolutely must travel by email, encrypt the file itself.
3. Turn on MFA everywhere money lives
Multi-factor authentication on email, accounting software, banking, and payroll means a stolen password alone gets an attacker nothing. This is the single highest-value security control available to a small business, and it costs almost nothing to enable. If it’s offered on an account you use, turn it on.
4. Audit before the crunch
Have your IT provider check for unpatched software, exposed endpoints, and stale accounts before your team is heads-down in filing work. Verify your backups actually restore, because a backup that fails during a ransomware incident is the most expensive discovery a business can make in March. This kind of review is routine under a managed IT services relationship, or you can start with a standalone cyber security risk assessment.
5. Verify every financial request out of band
Make it policy: no wire, vendor payment change, or W-2 release happens on the strength of an email alone. Confirm by phone using a number you already have, not one from the email signature. This one habit defeats nearly all business email compromise, which remains the costliest scam category for small businesses.
Don’t Let Attackers Collect This Season
We work with businesses across Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth every spring, and the pattern holds: companies that set these controls up in advance have a boring tax season, and boring is the goal. The only thing you should be filing is a return, not an incident report.
Want a pre-season check on where your defenses stand?