On November 10, President Biden announced his intent to nominate Danny Werfel to serve as Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). If confirmed by the Senate, Werfel, who served as the Acting Commissioner of the IRS in 2013 and is currently a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, will oversee an agency with a powerful, but recently problem-plagued, whistleblower program.
In 2019, Werfel shared some of his thoughts on whistleblowing as the host of the Gov Actually podcast. An October 31 episode of the podcast was entitled “The history and importance of whistleblowers.”
“It’s a powerful tool for oversight and rooting out problems,” Werfel said about whistleblowing.
“It just makes sense, not only for the government, but just in any organizational construct, in any societal construct, you want to incentivize people to report bad behavior and have that investigated,” Werfel continued.
Werfel also demonstrated his familiarity with the history of whistleblower laws in the United States, recounting the story behind the nation’s first whistleblower law and explaining how Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revamped the Civil War-era False Claims Act (FCA) in the late 1980s.
Werfel referred to the FCA, which offers monetary awards to whistleblowers, as one area where whistleblowing has been “particularly effective.” He explains that Grassley’s reforms to the FCA “really increased compliance and the ability for the government to track false claims.”
Similar to the FCA, the IRS...
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