IRS employee attempts to initimidate her landlord

If  you are a landlord, be careful about renting your unit to an employee of the IRS.  From the Philadelphia Inquirer comes the story of a tenant who used her position as an IRS employee to attempt to intimidate her landlord for the purpose of committing identity theft:

Using IRS letterhead, Flowers allegedly threatened her landlord with an audit unless she faxed copies her driver's license and Social Security card to a machine at the IRS which Flowers could access.

The attempt was thwarted by the Treasury Department, but there is a lesson in this story somewhere. It pays for landlords to know where their tenants work (not only for the traditional credit check purposes) and to retain that knowledge in case they receive threatening letters from those same agencies. 

This story also provides additional reasons for the landlords to obey all tax laws.  Had this landlord failed to report income from the property at issue, the tenant might have had a more dangerous basis on which to threaten the landlord and would not have needed to hijack IRS' letterhead.