WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last week, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R – Missouri) and every fellow Republican committee member introduced overdue legislation to toughen criminal sentences and fines for anyone convicted of leaking Americans’ private tax information.  In response, Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) President Jeffrey Mazzella issued the following statement in strong support of Chairman Smith’s bill. 

“For over a decade, Americans have witnessed example after example of government officials or outside activists exploiting private Internal Revenue Service (IRS) records to target private American citizens in scorched-earth efforts to advance their extreme political agendas. 

“In 2008, the IRS improperly disclosed lists of private donors to the National Organization for Marriage, and again in 2015 the IRS allowed hackers to breach its records, leading to the theft of sensitive information of 100,000 private taxpayers.  Americans also recall the infamous name Lois Lerner, after she deliberately subjected pro-Israel and conservative nonprofit organizations to illegal discrimination and persecution solely on the basis of their beliefs. 

“More recently, this year former IRS contractor and anti-Trump activist Charles Littlejohn was convicted of leaking the tax returns of Donald Trump and other Americans to The New York Times and far-left organization ProPublica.  Littlejohn allegedly had returned to the IRS in 2017 for the purpose of breaching and leaking Trump’s private IRS information, while ProPublica had previously leaked thousands of Americans’ private IRS tax returns spanning several years, thereby exposing them to untold numbers of other hacktivists and left-wing extremists.  

“All of those examples confirm the recurring threat that such violators pose to all Americans.  They penetrate the upper reaches of government bureaucracy to illegally and destructively violate the privacy rights of everyday citizens to advance their partisan crusades. 

“We applaud Chairman Smith and fellow cosponsors for introducing legislation that will increase the maximum penalty for unauthorized disclosure of tax information to up to 10 years of imprisonment and up to $250,000 in fines.  The bill will also clarify that each taxpayer affected by the leaked tax data will count as a distinct violation of the law.  That will finally provide a greater deterrent and punishment appropriate to the seriousness of the crime, and we urge others in Congress and across America to join CFIF in supporting this important reform legislation.” 

CFIF is a constitutional and free-market advocacy organization with over 300,000 supporters and activists nationwide. 

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