Sen. Grassley Wants to Know Why Treasury, IRS, DOJ, Are Silent on Confidential Tax Return Leak

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wants to know why, more than a year later, the Department of Treasury, Department of Justice (DOJ), and IRS have yet to explain to America who leaked highly confidential tax return data on hundreds of Americans to a news outlet.

“More than a year ago, the news website ProPublica began publishing stories that it claims are based on ‘a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years’,” Grassley told colleagues during a Sept. 12 floor speech.

“Since then, ProPublica has continued to publish articles that appear to use data leaked or hacked from the IRS. Despite questions from Congress and immediate expressions of concern from the Treasury Department and the IRS, we don’t know any more today than we did a year ago,” Grassley said.

“Even though these apparent leaks of confidential taxpayer information appear to target the wealthy, all taxpayers and anyone who cares about effective tax administration should be very concerned,” he said.

Spokespersons for Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and the DOJ did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on Grassley’s remarks. A spokesman for the IRS referred The Epoch Times to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The TIGTA spokesman said he could provide no information on the status of an investigation, if one exists.

ProPublica first revealed in a June 8, 2021, post that it had received what it described as tax information and data “we obtained … from an anonymous source who provided us with large amounts of information on the ultra-wealthy, everything from the taxes they paid, to the income they reported, to the profits from their stock trades.”

Since that first disclosure, ProPublica has published multiple articles allegedly based on the leaked information and data, with the latest appearing Sept. 6 under the headline “How a Billionaire’s ‘Attack Philanthropy’ Secretly Funded Climate Denialism and Right-Wing Causes.”

ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” While it is illegal to disclose any individual’s federal tax return, it is not illegal for media organizations to accept such materials.

Grassley said that until the leaker within, or hacker outside, the federal tax agency is identified, there are serious practical and national security concerns associated with the leak to ProPublica.

“At the end of the 2022 filing season, more than 145 million individual income tax returns were filed with the IRS. Right now, we don’t know if there is a current vulnerability to IRS systems that makes this personal information accessible within the IRS or to bad actors outside the IRS,” Grassley explained.

“We don’t know if a foreign nation with hostile intentions is responsible for a leak or hack of taxpayer information, or the full scope of IRS information that may be involved. Just because ProPublica hasn’t found it politically useful to publicly disclose your private taxpayer information doesn’t mean your tax information hasn’t also been compromised,” he said.

Grassley said Yellen’s silence on the issue is especially revealing because, shortly after the first ProPublica story was published, she was testifying before the House Committee on Ways and Means. When she was asked about the leak, Yellen responded, “I am as anxious as you are to find out what happened.”

On the same day as the first story was published, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee, on which Grassley is the ranking member, that he believed the “trust and confidence in the Internal Revenue Service is sort of the bedrock of asking people and requiring people to provide financial information. And, we have, as I said, turned it over to the appropriate investigators, external and internal.”

Grassley also pointed out in his Senate speech that Attorney General Merrick Garland described the leak as “an extremely serious matter. People are entitled, obviously, to great privacy with respect to their tax returns.”

A clearly frustrated Grassley concluded his remarks by noting that “if the Department of Justice and FBI want to show they take the confidentiality of taxpayer information seriously, they can start by fully and completely responding to my letter of June 24, which hasn’t yet been responded to. More than a full year, with a complete filing season, is too much time to have gone by without any information being provided at all.”

Grassley further observed that “Democrats constantly spoke of the need for fairness in the tax system as they pushed through their partisan tax and spending bill. Yet, we’ve heard barely a peep out of them on what may be the largest unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information in history.”