Tax Whistleblower Report

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By: The Ferraro Law Firm

Blog Authors

Erica L. Brady
Gregory S. Lynam
Hilary Lefko
Scott A. Knott
Stephen U. McCloskey, Jr.

Latest from Tax Whistleblower Report

Today the GAO released a study wherein they looked at the ability of the IRS to track and then pay awards on monies that are collected by the Government relating to “FBAR” violations.  Recall that FBAR stands for the “Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts”  and it represents information and return reporting requirements and associated penalties for violations thereof under Title 31’s Bank Secrecy Act.  The law on whistleblower awards changed on…
A report just released by TIGTA (the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration) shows that once again IRS audits of taxpayers are in decline.  Enforcement revenues are slightly up this year, but TIGTA says this is due to a small number of large corporate cases. Some highlights of the TIGTA report: “The number of staff assigned to Examination functions decreased 22 percent from FY 2013 to FY 2017, with a recent decline of 7 percent…
On March 9th, Tax Partner Scott Knott and I attended the Federal Bar Association Tax Law Conference in Washington, D.C.  Known colloquially as the “inside the beltway tax conference,” many high ranking federal government employees from DOJ, Treasury, and the IRS were in attendance and speaking on various new developments in the tax law. The key note speaker, Don Fort, Chief IRS Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), spoke about the work of his division in the…
We get absolutely deluged with hundreds of calls a day during tax return filing season about all kinds of fraud, particularly identity related scams and claiming child exemptions improperly.  In 2016, there was a 400% increase in tax related phishing and malware attacks, and 969,000 potentially fraudulent refunds claiming up to $6.5 billion. You may be unaware that you’re a victim until you try to file your taxes and IRS tells you something’s wrong. Here…
Happy New Year! The new year brings a time to reflect back on the past year, on things that went well, things that went not-so-well, and how you would like to do things going forward.  In the spirit of looking back over the last year, the IRS Whistleblower Office released its FY 2017 Annual Report to Congress earlier than usual this year, right after New Year’s.  In FY 2017, the Whistleblower Office paid $33,979,873 in…
Many tax fraud cases also involve securities law violations.  For instance, corporations engaged in tax evasion may also be creating fraudulent financials or offering securities to investors by providing misleading or untruthful information.  The most common compliant categories reported by whistleblowers to the SEC in fiscal 2017 were Corporate Disclosures and Financials, Offering Fraud, Manipulation, and Insider Trading. The SEC’s whistleblower program is moving full steam ahead according to the 2017 Annual Report of the …
Late on November 16th, the Senate Finance Committee voted to approve its iteration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passing the measure on a party-line 14-12 vote.  The full version can be found here.  Of particular interest to our readers here is one of the amendments that was added to this in committee.  Senator Grassley submitted a number of amendments to this bill including an amendment that: modifies section 7623 to define collected…
The IRS announced that whistleblower awards paid under section 7623 on or after October 1, 2017 and on or before September 30, 2018, will continue to be reduced by the “sequestration reduction rate”, which has now been lowered slightly to 6.6 percent.  The 6.6 percent fiscal 2018 sequestration reduction rate represents a .3 percent decrease from fiscal 2017’s 6.9 percent.  The sequestration reduction will unfortunately continue to be applied to whistleblower payments unless and…
There seems to be as many ways to cheat on your taxes as there are taxes.  State sales and use taxes are no different.  Some may not realize it but sales and use taxes are two different taxes.  Sales tax is usually collected by the seller at the time you buy an item and most of us have seen this on everything from car purchases to restaurant bills (even residents of the five states without…
On July 28, 2017, the Tax Court denied the April 14, 2016 Joint Motion to Remand the case to the IRS Whistleblower Office.  In the joint motion, the parties represented that the IRS Whistleblower Office had reconsidered its determination.  The Tax Court previously issued an order for the parties to file a status report by October 19, 2016, to report the efforts to resolve the case and held the joint motion in abeyance.  A similar…