IRS Hands Out $13.6M Whistleblower Award

The Internal Revenue Service has awarded a whistleblower $13.6 million for providing information that led to the government collecting over $52.6 million in taxes, penalties and interest in the case.

Attorneys Stephen Kohn of Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto and Dean Zerbe of Zerbe, Miller, Fingeret, Frank & Jadav LP thanked the whistleblower, a joint client, “for the courage to come forward and put the light on tax evasion by the wealthiest of the wealthy.”

The award, the attorneys said in their joint statement, “will hopefully encourage other whistleblowers to come forward. The IRS whistleblower award program is working.”

Kohn noted that this award “is one of the first, if not the first, award made by the IRS whistleblower office under the new law that clarified that tax whistleblowers should get awards based on taxpayer’s paying criminal penalties or FBAR” for foreign financial accounts.

As Kohn, Kohn noted in a February blog post, The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, signed into law by President Donald Trump, “included two key whistleblower qui tam amendments fixing loopholes in the IRS and Dodd-Frank Act whistleblower reward laws.”

The amendments, the law firm writes, “ensure that whistleblowers who expose criminal tax frauds are covered under the IRS whistleblower law, and close a tax loophole that double-taxed Dodd-Frank Act whistleblowers on their rewards, reducing payments by as much as 80%.”

The attorneys said in their joint statement that “Tax fraud whistleblowers should be heartened by the IRS whistleblower office’s decision to embrace this important clarification of the law. The IRS whistleblower law is well on its way to being as important to the federal government in combating fraud as the False Claims Act.”