Business Commons^™

Lost Opportunities: The Underuse Of Tax Whistleblowers, Sarah J. Webber, Karie Davis-Nozemack

Accounting Faculty Publications

Legal literature on whistleblower programs often assumes an agency’s ability to effectively use a whistleblower tip. This article challenges that assumption in the context of tax enforcement by exposing the Internal Revenue Service’s dismal performance. The article uses Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, taxpayer privacy law, as well as whistleblower and tax enforcement literature to propose a new approach to using information from tax whistleblowers.