President Joe Biden’s nominee for IRS commissioner vowed he would make it “a top priority” to assess the agency’s troubled process for investigating tips against the nation’s wealthiest tax cheats.
“It is critical that the IRS’s Whistleblower Program be treated with the highest priority,” the nominee, Danny Werfel, said in written answers to members of the Senate Finance Committee. The committee approved his nomination last week, and it will now head to a vote before the full Senate.
Werfel’s remarks cheered critics of the IRS and its notorious struggles to catch rich individuals and corporations who dodge their taxes.
Every year, the United States loses an estimated $1 trillion to unpaid taxes. The IRS whistleblower program was intended to be a powerful tool against wealthy tax cheats but is instead plagued by delays, infighting and a lack of investigative resources.
Congress set up the whistleblower office to incentivize those with knowledge of corporate and wealthy tax dodgers to tip off the IRS. In exchange, whistleblowers can get a cut of whatever the IRS collects, provided they didn’t plan or initiate the tax evasion scheme to begin with.
But critics, including members of Congress, describe the program as broken. In a HuffPost report in September, whistleblowers and their lawyers described waiting more than a decade for the agency to look into tips that could lead to the recovery of tens of millions or even billions of dollars in unpaid taxes.
One longtime...
Patricia White, 70, of Old Greenwich, received a nine-month prison sentence for submitting false claims for unclaimed properties to around 30 state treasuries. HARRISBURG, Pa. — Months after her br...