IRS Whistleblower Program

On January 28, 2013, in a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Department of Treasury (Treasury), Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), co-author of the 2006 updates to Section 7623 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), criticized the IRS Whistleblower Program (WBP) and WBP regulations that were presented in the agency’s December 14, 2012 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM).  Senator Grassley contrasted the WBP with the success of the Federal False Claims Act (FCA), under which over $30B has been recovered for the U.S. Treasury.  Unlike that program, the Senator argued, the WBP “regulations, as proposed, will hamstring the program by limiting the whistleblower awards and discouraging knowledgeable insiders from coming forward.”