I don't believe you need to submit your SSN to claim the credit. If you purchase the vehicle and meet all the requirements such as income limits you can claim the credit.
It may be that the IRS more closely reviews returns if you claim the credit and they don't have an automatic match in their database from dealer (Tesla) VIN/SSN data. Then you just send the IRS your purchase agreement as substantiation of your tax return and that will conclude their review.
Theres going to be thousands of cars purchased from thousands of dealerships all claiming credits. Some dealers will do paperwork and record data correctly. Others won't. The IRS most certainly is not going to perfectly have an exact record of every entitled buyers SSN. Especially this first year of implementation - everyone including the IRS is scrambling to figure out the rules and how to record this.
My guess is the IRS may only review if two people try to claim the credit using the same VIN. Or if a VIN doesn't match the required option for the credit claimed (over 80k/ foreign construction/etc). If they start to see trends with fraud they'll probably review those scenarios more closely. If not they have stacks of work they are way behind on and probably won't bother to look into seemingly legit credits.
I'm a CPA but don't currently work in tax. This is all just my opinions.
It may be that the IRS more closely reviews returns if you claim the credit and they don't have an automatic match in their database from dealer (Tesla) VIN/SSN data. Then you just send the IRS your purchase agreement as substantiation of your tax return and that will conclude their review.
Theres going to be thousands of cars purchased from thousands of dealerships all claiming credits. Some dealers will do paperwork and record data correctly. Others won't. The IRS most certainly is not going to perfectly have an exact record of every entitled buyers SSN. Especially this first year of implementation - everyone including the IRS is scrambling to figure out the rules and how to record this.
My guess is the IRS may only review if two people try to claim the credit using the same VIN. Or if a VIN doesn't match the required option for the credit claimed (over 80k/ foreign construction/etc). If they start to see trends with fraud they'll probably review those scenarios more closely. If not they have stacks of work they are way behind on and probably won't bother to look into seemingly legit credits.
I'm a CPA but don't currently work in tax. This is all just my opinions.