Free Republic

The Obama administration must acknowledge the existence of an independent investigation into former White House senior economics adviser Austan Goolsbee’s alleged unauthorized access to the Koch brother’s tax returns, a court ruled Tuesday. A federal judge ruled the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) must disclose to watchdog group Cause of Action whether records of an investigation exist. Cause of Action filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after TIGTA refused to confirm or deny the existence of the investigation in what is commonly known as a “Glomar response.” “The court has ruled that the federal government cannot...

The IRS failed to take all required steps for collecting unpaid taxes from people it can’t locate in over half the cases that investigators studied, potentially costing the government a pile of lost revenue, according to a federal report released Monday. The study does not estimate exactly how much money the IRS might collect if its workers were conducting all the research they are supposed to perform to find the taxpayers. The investigators wrote that in 2012, the IRS declared $6.7 billion in unpaid taxes to be uncollectable—involving nearly 483,000 tax returns—because it couldn’t find the taxpayers. Of that total,...