ATTORNEY NEWSLETTER

IRS Whistleblower Program Growing By Leaps and Bounds

IRS After Abusive Offshore Tax Avoidance Schemes

2016 marked the Tenth Anniversary of the Whistleblower Office at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Last week, the IRS reviewed that first decade in its Annual Report to Congress. The results are impressive. The IRS Whistleblower Office – where citizen whistleblowers help the Service prosecute tax cheats and get rewarded for it – may be relevant to you if you have some credible information of abusive tax avoidance. We’d like to share some of the ins and outs of the program with you. The IRS is particularly focused these days on abusive offshore tax avoidance schemes and if you have wind of one, please read on.

The IRS made 418 whistleblower awards in 2016 totaling more than $61 million. This represents a 322% increase over the previous year alone! On the heels of this success, the IRS enacted a series of changes to the whistleblower program to enhance enforcement teams and speed up claims processing. As Lee Martin, Director of the IRS Whistleblower Office put it, “The backlogs have now been fully addressed or eliminated – enabling claims to move further along in the process to be worked appropriately.” The innovations are welcome news to whistleblowers with credible information of abusive offshore tax avoidance schemes: their claims will be reviewed more quickly and evaluated more promptly. The Service is really serious about revving up investigation and prosecution of such schemes and maybe you can help.

The whistleblower claim review process will still take time. But the increased resources devoted to the program will help enormously. If you believe you have information on abusive offshore tax avoidance schemes, consult an IRS whistleblower attorney who will assist you in properly organizing your information and sifting through your evidence for what the IRS looks at most closely. Documentation and specific evidence of wrongdoing are the catchwords here; a mere hunch doesn’t go too far. Remember, the reward can be substantial so it may be worth the effort! If you have information about a tax cheat, or suspicions that abusive tax avoidance is occurring, now is the time to come forward. We at Evans Law Firm have experience in whistleblower cases (sometimes referred to as qui tam cases), and are ready to help you.

Contact Us

If you have information regarding tax fraud and are looking to be a whistleblower in San Francisco County or in any California county, contact the Evans Law Firm whistleblower/qui tam attorneys at (415) 441-8669, or by email at info@evanslaw.com. Our attorneys have experience with complex qui tam or whistleblower cases, complex financial contract cases and cases against large insurance companies. We can help guide your case through a jury trial or toward an equitable settlement. We handle cases involving physical and financial elder abuse, nursing home abuse, whole life insurance and universal life insurance, and indexed, variable, and fixed annuities.