Mark Matthews Comments: IRS More Aggressive in Closing Whistleblower Cases

The Internal Revenue Service's Whistleblower Office—which takes in tips of alleged tax fraud and evasion—has closed significantly more cases, paid more claims, awarded more money, and collected more unpaid taxes on average compared with the prior 10 years. However, the office is just catching up to where it should be and still lags far behind similar whistleblower operations at other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

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Part of the struggle is that the IRS has large privacy concerns to deal with, according to Mark Matthews, an attorney with Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered, in Washington, and former IRS deputy commissioner.

“The IRS will improve how it communicates with whistleblowers over time, but it has to walk a fine line on taxpayer privacy, which is critical to confidence in the system and deeply ingrained in everybody who works there,” said Matthews.

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Matthews said any discussion of the Whistleblower Office's growth needs to include the larger issues affecting the IRS.

“It's great that the IRS is expanding the Whistleblower Office, but the IRS needs more resources overall to work the leads it already has.” The IRS isn't short on leads, he told Bloomberg Tax.

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Excerpt taken from the article "IRS More Aggressive in Closing Whistleblower Cases, Data Shows" by Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones for Bloomberg Law, Daily Tax Report.