Senator Charles Grassley sent a letter in late January to the heads of the U.S. Department of Treasury (“Treasury”) and the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) criticizing the IRS for its failure to implement updates to the agency’s whistleblower regulations.  The purpose of Grassley’s letter was to continue to remind the IRS and Treasury of the [...]

A whistleblower who reported information about a corporate tax avoidance scheme to the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) whistleblower office received a reward of $38 million, the second largest reward in the history of the IRS.  The reward comes just two months after the IRS disbursed its largest ever reward to UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld.  The [...]

Tax whistleblowers will soon have someone who has shown a commitment to whistleblowers at the helm of the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”). According to an article on GovExec, Steven Miller, the current deputy commissioner for services and enforcement at the IRS, will become acting IRS Commissioner next month. He will replace current IRS Commissioner Douglas [...]

The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) Whistleblower Office, which we have written about frequently on this blog, announced recently that it has paid out over 90 awards since October 2011, and is currently working to speed up the process of compensating whistleblowers.  The IRS’s announcement  came after Sen. Charles Grassley, a longtime whistleblower advocate, held up [...]

Following a number of news articles decrying the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) Whistleblower Office (“WO”), as well as a May 2012 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) calling for improvements, the IRS WO called on June 20, 2012 for an internal review of operating guidelines and procedures.  [...]

The Government Accountability Office recently criticized a newly revamped IRS program which rewards whistleblowers for reporting corporate tax fraud.

According to the Internal Revenue Service’s “Fiscal Year 2010 Report to the Congress on the Use of Section 7623,” a report that the IRS recently released to Congress, more tax whistleblowers are coming forward and, under new whistleblower program rules, they are likely to see faster results from the IRS Whistleblower office. Not only did whistleblowers increase by 30 percent between fiscal years 2009 and 2010, but also total whistleblower rewards more than tripled from $5.8 million to $18.7 million. The IRS pays between 15 and 20 percent of recovered taxes, interest and penalties collected from disputes exceeding $2 million. Before the passage of the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, the IRS could choose whether or not to pay whistleblowers – today, under Section 7623(b), the payout is mandatory.

 A CPA has become the first recipient of a major award under the IRS’s whistleblower reward program. In an effort to reign in on corporate tax fraud, the IRS recently revised and expanded their whistleblower program, which previously mandated no reward, and attracted mostly small businesses and ex-spouses, to mandate a 15 to 30 percent [...]

An anonymous Wall Street banker was recently awarded $1.1 million under the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower program.  In 1999 the whistleblower brought information to the IRS that exposed fraudulent accounting schemes in which Bankers Trust and other Wall Street firms helped Enron in creating projects that artificially duplicated tax deductions, allowing Enron to generate [...]

Since 2007, the State of New York has allowed whistleblowers to use the state’s False Claims Act to sue on behalf of the state, in what is known as a qui tam suit, when they identify Medicaid fraud or contractors who have overbilled the state for goods and services. This month, Governor David A. Paterson [...]