A few years ago, the university I work for, you all know the one, the one that serves as an icon for excellence, discovered that they had made a very, very bad mistake in the handling of the employee-funded life insurance. You probably heard about it; it made the national news. The university worked directly with the IRS in correcting the error but it was a long and drawn out process. We had information up on our intranet explaining to employees what to do, should they be individually contacted by the IRS that the numbers didn't match, and had form letters, approved by the IRS and our legal department, that they could print off and fill out to submit if necessary.
While we were dealing with this fiasco and were actually only a few weeks away from wrapping the whole thing up, I took a call from a woman who was in frantic and terrified tears. She had gotten one of these spam phone calls telling her that IRS agents were on their way to her house to arrest her if she didn't provide an immediate payment. Naturally under the circumstances, she related that call to the issue with the life insurance and begged me to immediately email her a letter that would explain to these agents what had happened, with a promise of when payment would be made and even better, could she call me back when they got there so I could explain? I had a very hard time getting her to understand that (first) this was a fairly well known scam and (second) the nature of the error meant that she had OVERpaid and was due a refund!
