One Year Later, No One Has Been Punished for the IRS Leak of Billionaires' Tax DataThe IRS isn’t just a powerful federal agency, it’s a weapon against the public.
J.D. TUCCILLE
6.3.2022
In June 2021, ProPublica published confidential IRS tax information about wealthy Americans provided by a still-unidentified source. While we don't yet know who dumped the data, we do know that this is far from the first time that the tax agency, which forces people to reveal sensitive details about their finances, has proven to be an unreliable custodian of that information, and that's putting it nicely. Too often, federal tax collectors misuse official records for fun, profit, and political advantage.
"Today, ProPublica is launching the first in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of our nation's richest citizens," ProPublica's Stephen Engelberg and Richard Tofel wrote on June 8, 2021. "Many will ask about the ethics of publishing such private data. We are doing so—quite selectively and carefully—because we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden."
Included in the treasure trove of tax data were details about the tax bills of people including Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett. Drawn from IRS records, the information was provided through "secure systems that allow whistleblowers to transmit information to us without revealing their identity." The data revealed that many wealthy Americans successfully minimize their tax burdens, which might have been the source's purpose, though that's anybody's guess. People have many motivations for releasing information and ProPublica admits it doesn't know the source's intentions.
In fact, the IRS leaks like a sieve on a regular basis for all sorts of reasons.
"[T]he IRS completed 1,694 investigations into the willful unauthorized access of tax data by employees—and 27% were found to be violations," the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported last month.
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Not that the tax authorities necessarily care. History suggests that IRS leaks carry minimal consequences for the agency.
"The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) previously issued an audit report in September 2006 on the IRS's Office of Privacy and found that the IRS was not complying with legislative privacy requirements," TIGTA reported in 2013. "Despite its commitment toward privacy and improvements from our prior review, the IRS continues to face challenges in meeting legislative privacy requirements."
And here we are in 2022 with, apparently, still a good deal of room for improvement after decades of abuses of privacy by tax collectors and wrist-slaps by their watchdogs. Almost a year after the initial ProPublica story, and after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised "to get to the bottom of this criminal activity," the federal government still claims to have no idea who leaked the data. "There have been no arrests nor any official hints about how the wall of secrecy around tax records was broken; it is unknown whether the IRS has found or closed any security gaps," reports the Wall Street Journal.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/06/03/irs-leak-of-billionaires-tax-data/
