Every year the Internal Revenue Service announces the top 12 tax scams. This tax season, topping the latest Dirty Dozen are fraudulent schemes connected with the one-time telephone excise tax refund available to most taxpayers.

The excise tax refund is available only on your 2006 federal income tax return and is intended to refund taxes collected on long-distance telephone service. It's available for anyone who paid such taxes on a land line, fax, computer or cell phone for the period between Feb. 28, 2003, and Aug. 1, 2006.

To make it easier for taxpayers, the IRS has set a standard refund amount, ranging from $30 to $60, based on the number of exemptions claimed on your return.

You don't need to present proof to take the standard refund. However, you can instead figure your refund using the actual amount of tax paid, based on your phone bills and other records.

Because taxpayers can request a refund for the exact amount of the taxes collected, unscrupulous tax preparers have persuaded people to claim a higher refund than they are entitled to.

In some cases, people are asking for thousands of dollars. Others are requesting what looks to be the entire amount of their phone bills for the period in question.

In the most egregious cases, some individuals have asked for a refund of $30,000, which means they would have had a long-distance bill of $1 million from the end of February 2003 through the beginning of this past August. That 41-month period covers the time the 3 percent excise tax was collected.

The IRS is conducting site visits with tax preparers across the country to try to stop inflated requests for the one-time telephone excise tax refund. The visits started with 22 tax preparers who have handled more than 1,500 tax returns.

"We are taking this unusual step to confront blatant abuse of this important refund program," said IRS commissioner Mark Everson. "We want tax preparers to prepare accurate tax returns. If they don't, we will move swiftly to impose civil penalties and, where warranted, seek criminal sanctions."

Everson said individuals requesting what appear to be inflated refunds will see those refunds frozen and they may be subject to an audit.

This year's Dirty Dozen list features some new scams (see the full list at www.irs.gov). Here are a few on the list that caught my attention: