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…

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…