BEWARE OF IRAS TAX SCAM EMAIL, DO NOT FALL PREY TO HACKERS

There have been reported cases of individuals receiving emails, letters, Short Message Services (SMS), or phone calls purportedly from IRAS, requesting you to do one or more of the following:

Open an email link or file attachment to review your income or tax statement;

Transfer a sum of money, supposedly for tax purposes, to accounts belonging to named individuals (usually an overseas account); and/or

Pay sums of money to named individuals (usually a party not residing in Singapore) before an inheritance/estate of a deceased party is released.

Provide your bank account numbers to claim tax refunds, enjoy cash rewards, or pay outstanding tax bills; and/or

Provide confidential personal information such as personal particulars, personal identification numbers, passwords and bank account numbers, either by completing a form on a website or to someone who impersonates as IRAS staff.

For your own interest, please be extra careful when you receive unsolicited emails, letters, SMSes, phone calls, online chats or all other forms of communication asking you to provide confidential or personal information. Under no circumstances should you give personal information including credit card or banking details to third parties via email, letter, SMS or phone.

Important Note:

Lately, scam emails that mimicked IRAS’ email address ending with “ @iras.gov.sg” have been sent to some members of the public. Certain parts of the email details have been changed by the scammers to make them appear as if the email was sent by IRAS. Such scam emails usually carried a file attachment requesting the recipients to open it. You are advised not to click on any link or open any attachment in the email as it may contain computer virus.

IRAS does not send out official emails from personal email accounts such as Hotmail, Gmail, or other unfamiliar email domains. IRAS’ email replies are usually signed off with an officer's name, designation and contact information. IRAS also does not send out confidential documents such as tax return forms, notices of assessment, refund letters or other tax statements through unsecured emails. Confidential documents are deposited in the secured tax portal at mytax.iras.gov.sg. Taxpayers may log in to the portal using their SingPass to retrieve their tax statements or e-File their tax returns via mytax.iras.gov.sg.

IRAS will not ask you to provide your confidential personal details through emails. We encourage you to use myTax Mail to correspond with IRAS. If your enquiry contains confidential information, we will respond to you via myTax Mail.

When you make a cheque payment for tax, it must only be made payable to one of the relevant payees, as given below :

Comptroller of Income Tax

Comptroller of Goods & Services Tax

Comptroller of Property Tax

Commissioner of Stamp Duties