New disclosures of U.S. taxpayers’ confidential information are motivated by Democratic Party politics and the goal of raising taxes, say taxpayer advocates.
The conservative Americans for Tax Reform, which advocates for lower taxes, wrote that the information made public Tuesday by the investigative news outlet ProPublica was “stolen and given to a progressive group with the goal of advancing President Biden’s proposed tax increases and expanded IRS powers.”
“The decision by the left-wing ProPublica to receive stolen private tax returns from the IRS has taught all Americans one, their tax returns are no longer private, and two, Biden wants to spend $80 billion hiring 87,000 more IRS agents without finding and firing those responsible,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said in a statement.
“This IRS attack on taxpayers will create a new Tea Party movement that focuses on IRS abuses and Biden’s implied support for it,” Mr. Norquist added.
ProPublica published online the private tax information from billionaires such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and liberal financier George Soros, among others.
ProPublica said it did not know its information’s source, including whether it was a foreign adversary hostile to the U.S., but argued that publicizing details from a vast cache of IRS information it claimed to have obtained was necessary to drive readers’ interest in tax policy as the Biden administration proposes more taxes to pay for government spending.
Patrick Hedger, vice president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, tweeted that nothing he saw disclosed showed evidence of wrongdoing, meaning he viewed the disclosures as a leak and not whistleblowing.
“We’re just months into a new Democratic administration and already the law enforcement agency [IRS] is being used for political ends,” Mr. Hedger tweeted.
If ProPublica is being used by a political actor seeking to shape public opinion in support of the Biden administration’s taxation agenda, the news site has indicated it does not care.
“We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases,” wrote ProPublica’s editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg and President Richard Tofel. “We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.”
“Provenance is not essential; accuracy is. We have gone to considerable lengths to confirm that the information sent to us is accurate. … Having said that, because it remains possible that not everything in our database is accurate, every person whose tax information was described in today’s story was given an opportunity to point out inaccuracies or omissions before the story appeared,” they wrote.
Regarding the private tax information, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday that any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information was illegal and the federal government was investigating it.
Treasury Department spokesperson Lily Adams on Wednesday echoed Ms. Psaki’s statement and told The Washington Times that the matter is being referred to the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, FBI, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday his agency would see to it that people are prosecuted if a federal law was violated.
“I share the concerns of every American for the sensitive and private nature and confidential nature of the information the IRS receives,” Mr. Rettig said at the Senate hearing. “As you all are well aware, I spent 36 years on the outside, [and] I think that trust and confidence in the Internal Revenue Service is sort of the bedrock of asking people and requiring people to provide financial information.”
As those entities investigate, Mr. Engleberg and Mr. Tofel wrote that ProPublica intends to continue exploring how wealthy Americans “exploit” tax policies and “provide factual evidence for lawmakers” considering changes to the tax code.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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