Recent Posts
-
DATA Act Gets a Boost at Transparency Conference
September 13, 2013 -
Why Zero Wall Street CEOs Are in Jail
September 13, 2013 -
Senators Ask State Department To Respond to POGO Report on Embassy Security
September 12, 2013 -
SIGIR Releases Its Final Report
September 12, 2013 -
VA Makes Headway on Backlog with New Technology
September 12, 2013 -
Benghazi Ignored: New Evidence Exposes Gaps in Kabul Embassy Security
September 10, 2013 -
Map Shows State Dept. Official Gave Misleading Testimony to Congress
September 10, 2013 -
Watchdog Finds Flaws in DOE Contractor Responsibility Checks
September 10, 2013 -
DoD IG Confirms POGO’s DARPA Concerns
September 6, 2013
IRS Threatens to Weaken Whistleblower Program
TweetMarch 20, 2013
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has proposed regulations that would “hamstring” its whistleblower program, according to Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), a longtime champion of whistleblowers.
Last month, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) echoed Senator Grassley’s concerns in a comment letter to the IRS, which the Government Accountability Project (GAP) also joined.
Legislation authored by Senator Grassley in 2006 enabled the IRS to offer a financial award to people who blow the whistle on Americans hiding money from the tax collector. The IRS program is modeled after the False Claims Act, which has recovered $35 billion for taxpayers since 1986.
But the program will only work if whistleblowers are encouraged to come forward. According to Senator Grassley, the IRS’s regulations would do just the opposite.
One proposal would “unduly limit the scope of the program,” he warned, by excluding whistleblower tips “relating to undisclosed foreign bank accounts” if the information does not “directly [relate] to the underpayments themselves.”
Another proposal could “drastically limit the number of corporate whistleblowers,” he said, because it allows the IRS to “claim that the information provided dealt with a topic that was covered in a regularly scheduled IRS audit,” and therefore does not qualify for an award.
Elsewhere in the proposal, the IRS cautioned that awards may be reduced for whistleblowers who “planned and initiated the tax fraud,” even if they only “[k]new or had reason to know that there were tax implications to planning and initiating the underlying act.”
“There is a delicate balance that needs to be struck between weeding out bad actors while not discouraging knowledgeable insiders from coming forward,” Senator Grassley said, and the proposal “fails to properly strike this delicate balance.”
POGO and GAP also raised concerns about a senior IRS official, William Wilkins, who used to lobby the IRS and other agencies on behalf of the Swiss Bankers Association. We asked the IRS to restrict Wilkins from working on the proposal. “Swiss banks such as UBS have been at the center of tax evasion scandals and have a major stake in the IRS’s whistleblower regulations,” the letter said.
We urged the IRS to amend the regulations so that they “expand, not limit, the opportunities for whistleblowers to come forward.”
“At a time when the IRS is struggling with a heavy workload and limited resources, the agency should be doing everything it can to incentivize and protect corporate insiders who are in the position to blow the whistle on tax fraud,” the letter said.
The IRS will be holding a public hearing on April 10 to discuss the proposed regulations.
Michael Smallberg is an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight. Michael's investigations center on oversight of the financial sector.
Topics: Whistleblower Protections
Related Content: Financial Oversight
Authors: Michael Smallberg
Stay Connected
Browse POGOBlog by Topic
POGO on Facebook
Latest Podcast
Podcast: How The Intelligence World Came to Rely on Contractors
POGO's Scott Amey talks about the growing private intelligence industry that includes major federal contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, the former employer of Edward Snowden. Podcast with Joe Newman, Aimee Thomson, Jana Persky and Andre Francisco.



