Grassley: IRS Whistleblower Program Could Catch Tax Fraud if Agency Focuses

Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on Finance, has worked to improve the whistleblower program at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to fight tax fraud. Grassley is the Senate author of the 1986 whistleblower amendments to the federal False Claims Act. He made the following comment on the IRS’ annual report on its whistleblower program.

“It’s good to see so many whistleblower submissions coming into the IRS. The tax code improvements are still new, and I hope more whistleblowers will come forward as word gets out. The whistleblower amendments to the False Claims Act have returned more than $13 billion to the U.S. Treasury since their enactment in 1986. Total False Claims Act recoveries (federal and state) since the 1986 amendments now total over $22 billion. The federal False Claims Act doesn’t cover tax fraud, so it was important to apply the same whistleblower incentives to tax cheating. I hope the IRS will work faster to process the whistleblower submissions, try not to accumulate a backlog, and stop as many big-dollar fraud operations as possible. Good-faith whistleblowers often have very valuable things to say. The IRS should see them as a valuable resource in fighting the tax gap and put their knowledge to good use. The $13 billion recovered through the False Claims Act whistleblower provisions should be an inspiration.”

The report is available here:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/whistleblower/annual_report_to_congress_september_2009.pdf

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