As reported by The Washington Post, on April 4, 2014, the IRS issued its “Fiscal Year 2013 Report to the Congress on the Use of Section 7623” revealing that it paid whistleblowers $53 million in 2013. The agency said that it paid out 122 awards last year, making the average payout a whopping $435,000.
Senator Grassley’s Harsh Criticisms Of IRS Whistleblower Program Implementation
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.”
IRS Whistleblower Program: Payouts Rise in 2012
On February 13, 2013, the IRS issued its “Fiscal Year 2012 Report to the Congress on the Use of Section 7623,” as required by The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (Act). The Act was established “to encourage people with knowledge of significant tax noncompliance to provide that