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IRS Atty: Officials Giving Away Billions And Tax Evasion
Author: Scarinci Hollenbeck, LLC
Date: October 30, 2014
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An Internal Revenue Service lawyer in the Office of Chief Counsel in New York is claiming that the organization’s officials are giving away billions via tax evasion to corporations and the undermining of whistleblowers.
In a letter sent to U.S. Department of the Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and copied to Sens. Chuck Grassley, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, IRS attorney Jane Kim requested that the agency be audited and investigated by Congress, according to Law 360. The most serious allegations include that the IRS is intentionally not acting on billion-dollar corporate tax avoidance cases. Kim described speaking with an attorney whose clients came forward to blow the whistle on three companies regarding the avoidance of more than $10 billion in taxes. Despite this information, the IRS allegedly declined to pursue the cases without looking into them.
“This is not a partisan issue, but a 99 percent versus 1 percent issue, in which the IRS seems to be placing 99 percent of American taxpayers on a grossly uneven playing field,” Kim said in the letter, which was published by Raw Story.
Speaking with Raw Story, the private sector lawyer and former IRS lawyer in the Office of the Chief Counsel, whose cases Kim references, said that these cases are representative of a deep trend in the organization.
“The problem is the IRS upper management don’t want a big case going forward,” the lawyer told the news source on the condition of anonymity. “They are purposely not working big cases. Employees are quietly encouraged not to expedite them, and to settle or dismiss them. I’ve seen the IRS sit on straightforward billion-dollar cases for years, and then decide not to pursue.”
In her letter, Kim explains that she thinks the policies that govern the IRS Whistleblower Office are too small and ineffectual.
“These policies do not form a working mechanism to root out wrongdoing,” Kim wrote. “The office seems to be drowning in thousands of untouched high-quality tips per year and multibillion-dollar cases its small workforce of 36 staff members is incapable of properly vetting.”
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