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Whistleblowers to Get Full Share of Collected Proceeds, Including Fines and Forfeitures. The Tax Court held a husband and wife who supplied information to the Internal Revenue Service are entitled to a full 24 percent of the “collected proceeds,” which includes a criminal fine and civil forfeitures to the government, not just tax restitution. …continue…

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Tax Court awarded $17.8 million to a pair of whistleblowers in a decision that significantly expands the scope of what can be claimed in such cases. The ruling for the first time allowed the whistleblowers to get a portion of criminal fines and civil forfeitures in addition to part of the taxes the…

In an important win for whistleblowers, the Tax Court on August 3 determined that criminal fines and civil forfeitures are collected proceeds for purposes of whistleblower awards, refusing to narrow what it saw as the broad scope of the statutory language. Dean Zerbe of Zerbe, Fingeret, Frank & Jadav PC, who worked the case as…

FBAR Penalties Do Not Count Toward Whistleblower Threshold …continue reading >>

Discovery in a whistleblower case is not an easy path – with the challenge being that the whistleblower is often in a position of limited knowledge of what happened with the information provided and the ultimate results (unlike a typical tax case where the IRS knows what it did and the taxpayer knows what they…