In 2006, Congress passed a law creating a modern whistleblower award program at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Now, the Congressional staffer and legal expert who helped lead the efforts to write that law is advocating for reforms to strengthen the IRS Whistleblower Program.
Dean Zerbe, partner at Zerbe, Miller, Fingeret, Frank and Jadav, LLP and Senior Policy Analyst at the National Whistleblower Center, served as the Senior Counsel and Tax Counsel on the Senate Finance Committee for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). In that role, he led the efforts of drafting the legislation which created the IRS Whistleblower Office and established a new framework for the consideration of whistleblower submissions and award payments.
Since then, the IRS Whistleblower Program has become an integral part of the IRS’s enforcement efforts by incentivizing insiders to come forward and disclose hard-to-detect misconduct. Whistleblower disclosures have led to the collection of over $6 billion from tax fraudsters.
However, the program has struggled in recent years as delays have grown and payouts to whistleblowers have dropped. While recent administrative reforms have strengthened the program, advocates believe that it has even more potential.
For the past few years, Zerbe and other advocates have been calling for the passage of the bipartisan IRS Whistleblower Improvement Act. Introduced in the last session of Congress by Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-OR) the bill makes a number of...
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