Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
IRS News
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IRS To Lose 22% Of Taxpayer Service Workers After Trump Purge
Bloomberg, IRS to Lose 22% of Taxpayer Service Workers After Trump Purge: The IRS should quickly hire thousands of new taxpayer service employees so it’s prepared for next year’s filing season, given the agency is losing more than one-fifth of those workers under Trump administration-directed cuts, the National Taxpayer Advocate said in her mid-year report. The…
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IRS Releases 2024 Data Book
IR-2025-63, IRS Releases Fiscal Year 2024 Data Book Describing Agency’s Activities: The Internal Revenue Service today issued its annual Data Book detailing the agency's activities during fiscal year 2024 (Oct. 1, 2023 – Sept. 30, 2024). This year’s edition marks the publication’s 30-year anniversary; the first Data Book covered fiscal years 1993 and 1994 and…
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TIGTA: IRS Paid $21 Billion In Improper Tax Credits In 2024
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, Assessment of Fiscal Year 2024 Compliance With Improper Payment Reporting Requirements (No. 2025-400-025) (May 9, 2025): For FY 2024, the IRS partially complied with the reporting requirements contained in the Payment Integrity Information Act (PIIA). As in prior years, the IRS calculated improper payment rates for the following four…
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Trump Nominates Donald Korb To Serve A Second Stint As IRS Chief Counsel
Bloomberg, Bush-Era Lawyer Picked by Trump to Serve as Top IRS Attorney: President Donald Trump nominated former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb [Sullivan & Cromwell] to be the top lawyer again at the tax agency. Korb would take over the spot after Marjorie Rollinson resigned at the end of the Biden administration, and join the…
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Chodorow: Trump, Musk, Senate Republicans, And Your Taxes
Slate: Why Withholding Your Taxes in Protest Could Actually Help Trump and Musk, by Adam Chodorow (Arizona State; Google Scholar): It’s tax season, and if you’re upset about how things are going in government right now, you might be tempted to protest by withholding your taxes. After all, conservatives had their Tea Party moment. Why shouldn’t those…
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From Bob Jones To Columbia: Using Tax Law To Eliminate Discriminatory DEI Practices In Education
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: From Bob Jones to Columbia University and DEI, by James Taranto: It seems the administrators of Columbia University are welcoming Donald Trump as their liberator from the tyranny of wokeness. “The school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands,” the Journal noted Friday in reporting Columbia’s…
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WSJ: IRS Retreats From Some Audits As Agency Slashes Workforce
Wall Street Journal, IRS Retreats From Some Audits as Agency Slashes Workforce: The Trump administration’s rapid shrinking of the Internal Revenue Service is ending some large audits and putting others in limbo. That is the early fallout of a retreat from stepped-up tax enforcement that could dent compliance and cost the government tens of billions of dollars in revenue.…
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IRS Nears Deal To Give ICE Addresses Of Immigrants Targeted For Deportation
New York Times, I.R.S. Prepares to Help Find Immigrants Targeted for Deportation: The tax agency is nearing an agreement to verify whether ICE officials have the right address for people they are trying to deport. The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to help homeland security officials locate immigrants they are trying to deport, according to…
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IRS Braces For 10 Percent Less Tax Revenue ($500 Billion) Due To DOGE Staff And Budget Cuts
Washington Post, Tax Revenue Could Drop by 10 Percent Amid Turmoil at IRS: Staff cuts and disruptions related to the U.S. DOGE Service have officials bracing for a sharp loss of revenue. Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn…
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Trump DEI Mandate And Staff Cuts Threaten IRS Effort To End Racial Bias
Bloomberg, IRS Effort to End Racial Bias Threatened by Trump DEI Mandate: Diane Lim hadn’t even finished putting together her team at the Treasury Department’s Equity Hub before she got the notice from the Trump administration forcing her group to go on administrative leave within days of the January inauguration. The Treasury Equity Hub is one…
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NY Times: Trump’s War On The IRS And 19 Tax Issues Facing Congress
New York Times, Stalled Audits and a Skeleton Staff: Inside Trump’s War on the I.R.S.: President Trump is planning to gut the work force while trying to turn the I.R.S. into a more political agency. … This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former I.R.S. officials, aides on Capitol…
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ProPublica: How DOGE’s IRS Cuts Threaten To Cost More Than They Will Save
ProPublica, How DOGE’s Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save: ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency. In late February, the Trump administration began…
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NY Times: Trump Administration Pushes To Slash IRS Workforce By 50%
New York Times, Trump Administration Pushes to Slash I.R.S. Work Force in Half: The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to shed as much as 50 percent of its staff, according to four people familiar with the matter, a significant cut that could jeopardize the agency’s ability to complete its basic mission of collecting taxes. The…
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DOGE Presses To Check Federal Benefits Payments Against IRS Tax Records
Washington Post, DOGE Presses to Check Federal Benefits Payments Against IRS Tax Records: Officials with Elon Musk’s group say they want to search for fraud. Privacy law bars the IRS from disclosing tax information to other parts of the government. Officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have expressed interest in using personal tax records…
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NY Times Op-Ed By 7 IRS Commissioners: Firing 6,700 IRS Workers In The Middle Of Tax Season Is A Huge Mistake
New York Times Op-Ed: Trump Just Fired 6,700 I.R.S. Workers in the Middle of Tax Season. That’s a Huge Mistake., by IRS Commissioners Lawrence Gibbs (1986-1989), Fred T. Goldberg Jr. (1989-1992), Charles Rossotti (1997-2002), Mark Everson (2003=2007), John Koskinen (2013-17), Charles Rettig (2018-2022) & Daniel Werfel (2032-2025): If you were to ask the top chief…
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NY Times: IRS To Lay Off Thousands Of Employees
New York Times, I.R.S. Expected to Lay Off Thousands: The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to lay off thousands of employees as soon as next week, according to three people familiar with the matter, as the Trump administration pushes to dramatically shrink the size of the federal work force. The Office of Personnel Management, the…
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Tax Bar Steps Up To Help 200 Law Students And Graduates With Rescinded Job Offers From The IRS And DOJ Tax Division Due To Trump Hiring Freeze
Following up on my previous posts: IRS Chief Counsel Rescinds Job Offers To 3Ls Accepted Into Honors Program Department Of Justice Rescinds Job Offers To 3Ls Accepted Into Honors Program Trump's Hiring Freeze Leaves Thousands Of Law Students Out In The Cold Caroline Ciraolo, former Acting Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice…
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More Rich Taxpayers Learn Their Data Was Stolen in Huge IRS Leak
Bloomberg Law, More Rich Taxpayers Learn Their Data Was Stolen in Huge IRS Leak: The IRS sent another wave of letters to taxpayers whose data was stolen amid a historic breach by an agency contractor several years ago. Charles Littlejohn stole the tax returns of prominent billionaires and President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2020…
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IRS Chief Counsel Rescinds Job Offers To 3Ls Accepted Into Honors Program
Tax Notes, Federal Hiring Freeze Quickly Hits Prospective IRS Attorneys: Graduate students who accepted offers to work at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel have begun seeing those offers rescinded following the freeze on federal hiring, according to professors. President Trump on January 20 signed an executive order halting all federal hiring and specifying that…
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First Bitcoin Investor To Get Prison Time For Crypto-Related Tax Evasion
Law360, Bitcoin Investor Gets 2 Years For Tax Fraud In Landmark Case: An investor who concealed millions of dollars he earned in bitcoin and became the first person criminally charged for failing to report gains from the sale of cryptocurrency by filing false returns was sentenced to two years in federal prison Thursday. Ars Technica,…
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Musk & Ramaswamy DOGE Commission Eyes Tax Filing App
Washington Post, Musk’s ‘DOGE’ Commission Eyes New App for Americans to File Taxes: The leaders of President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have discussed trying to create a mobile app for Americans to file their taxes free with the Internal Revenue Service, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to…
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WaPo: Meet The Black-Belt, Tattooed IRS Official Who Saved 23 Children From Their Abusers
Washington Post, Meet the Black-Belt, Tattooed IRS Official Who Saved 23 Children From Their Abusers: At an early-morning Brazilian jujitsu class in Hamburg, N.Y., sweat flies as men pair off and pounce on each other, grappling and grunting on the mats. The fighters are so entangled that it’s hard to tell which hand or foot…
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WSJ: A Tax-Shelter Crackdown Uncovers A Dentist’s ‘Smile High Trust’
Wall Street Journal Tax Report, A Tax-Shelter Crackdown Uncovers a Dentist’s ‘Smile High Trust’: Ryan Ulibarri, a family dentist in Fort Collins, Colo., is in tax trouble that could take a big bite of his time and money [Department of Justice Press Release]. In late August, a Denver grand jury indicted him on six criminal counts…
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Tax Whistleblowers Receive $74m Of $263m Recovery; IRS Plans 170% Increase In Whistleblower Office Staff
Washington Post, They Exposed a Tax Cheater. They’ll Share a $74 Million Reward.: The IRS recovered $263 million from a single individual, ending more than a decade of tax evasion and one of its biggest whistleblower cases ever, according to lawyers from three firms involved in the case. The three informants will split $74 million,…
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IRS: The Tax Consequences Of Online Crowdfunding
FS-2024-28 (Aug. 2024), IRS Reminds Taxpayers of Important Tax Guidelines Involving Contributions and Distributions from Online Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding distributions may be includible in the gross income of the person receiving them depending on the facts and circumstances. The crowdfunding website or its payment processor may be required to report distributions of money raised if the amount…