USA

Whistleblower slams IRS as resistant to and suspicious of private citizens who blow the whistle on tax fraud

David S. Hilzenrath – March 15, 2011

Before Enron was publicly exposed as a financial house of cards, a whistleblower tipped the Internal Revenue Service that the company was using abusive tax shelters to generate fictitious income, a law firm representing the informant said Tuesday. Now, more than a decade later, the IRS has paid that whistleblower a $1.1 million reward, the law firm said.

“If the IRS had pursued this information in 1999 when my client first informed them of these abusive tax shelters, the government might have realized the depth of Enron’s problems and perhaps taken steps that might have helped avoid a total meltdown,” lawyer Erika A. Kelton of the Washington firm Phillips & Cohen said in a news release.

March 11, 2011

WASHINGTON (CN) – A federal judge on Thursday delayed sentencing again for the former head of the federal whistle-blower protection office, one day after refusing to let Bush appointee Scott Bloch withdraw his guilty plea to the charge that he tried to undermine a congressional investigation of him.

Bloch, who was appointed by President George W. Bush as special counsel for the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, was removed from office in October 2008 amid congressional and federal corruption inquiries. When Bloch took office, he created controversy by stating that gay and lesbian employees could not be protected from discrimination.

Glenn Greenwald – February 25, 2011

Last April, the DOJ served a subpoena on New York Times reporter James Risen, demanding to know his source for a story he published in his 2006 book regarding a "reckless" and horribly botched CIA effort to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program.

That subpoena had originally been served but was then abandoned by the Bush DOJ, but its revitalization by the Obama administration was but one of many steps taken to dramatically expand the war on whistleblowers being waged by the current President, who ran on a platform of "protecting whistleblowers":

William Neuman – February 10, 2011

When top executives of Tyson Foods discovered that the company’s Mexican chicken plants were paying bribes to government inspectors, they not only allowed the practice to continue, they formed a committee to find a more acceptable way to make the illicit payments, according to federal court documents released on Thursday.

Federal officials announced that Tyson agreed to pay $5.2 million in fines and other penalties to settle enforcement actions by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which included criminal and civil charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.