Before ending the practice of making unannounced field visits to taxpayers’ homes earlier this year, with limited exceptions, the IRS “committed alarming civil liberties abuses,” according to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The subcommittee released a report on Friday detailing several abuses enabled by the unannounced field visits, including an instance where an agent turned up outside journalist Matt Taibbi’s home on the same day he testified before Congress about government censorship.
The IRS opened a case against Taibbi three weeks after he published the first installment of the Twitter Files and on the same day that he published the ninth installment, which detailed how federal government agencies “from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA” coordinated to censor and coerce speech on various social-media platforms.
The agency opened its examination of Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on Christmas Eve in 2022, which was also a Saturday. Taibbi did not even owe the IRS anything — instead, the agency owned Taibbi a “substantial refund.”
The IRS assigned a revenue officer to Taibbi’s case to initiate face-to-face contact on January 27, 2023. The officer then “performed an extensive investigation into Mr. Taibbi, using both publicly available search engines and commercial investigative software to compile a dossier about Mr. Taibbi.”
The dossier included information such as Mr. Taibbi’s voter-registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, and whether he had a concealed-weapons permit.
An IRS agent made an unannounced visit to Taibbi’s home on March 9, 2023, when Taibbi and journalist Michael Shellenberger testified before the Select Subcommittee about the Twitter Files. The testimony came in the wake of the subcommittee’s finding that the Federal Trade Commission ordered Twitter to turn over the identities of all journalists given access to Twitter’s internal communications along with the “nature of access granted [to] each person.”
“I was upset, obviously. . . . This kind of thing—when the government is looking for information about reporters—is usually a canary in the coal mine that something worse is coming in terms of an effort to exercise control over the press. So, on that level, it’s absolutely disturbing,” Taibbi testified before the committee.
An IRS agent left a note at Taibbi’s home asking him to call the agency four days later. When Taibbi called the agency, he was informed that it had rejected his electronic 2018 and 2021 tax return filings over concerns of identity theft. Yet in 2019, the IRS notified Taibbi’s accountant that it had accepted his 2018 filing.
Taibbi and his accountant were not notified of any issue with the return in the four-and-a-half years between the filing and when the investigation was opened. However, Taibbi was aware that the IRS had rejected his 2021 electronic filing twice, despite his accountant having filed with an IRS-provided pin number. Yet the IRS did not attempt to contact Taibbi before making its unannounced field visit.
“[I]t’s hard not to see [my case] as some kind of retaliation or an attempt to intimidate. Maybe not me, but future reporters who would look at this kind of material,” Taibbi said.
After the subcommittee requested information about the situation on March 27, the IRS produced 267 pages of documents on May 6. The agency claimed it sent a letter to Taibbi about the 2018 return on October 24, 2019, asking Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria. The IRS claimed it sent another letter to Taibbi on March 23, 2020, though Taibbi and his accountant never received either letter.
The subcommittee said the IRS failed to include proof of the letters among the 267 pages of documents.
Before ending the practice of making unannounced field visits in July, with limited exceptions, the IRS made tens of thousands of unannounced visits to homes and businesses each year.
The report goes on to detail an incident in which an IRS agent used “a false name and deceptive pretenses” to enter an Ohio taxpayers home to “harass and intimidate the taxpayer without prior notice or just cause.”
The incident occurred on April 25, 2023 when an agent, who introduced himself as “Bill Haus” from the IRS’s Criminal Division, told a taxpayer he was at her home to discuss issues concerning an estate for which the taxpayer was the fiduciary. Haus told the taxpayer she failed to properly complete the filings for the estate and that she owed the IRS “a substantial amount,” though she had not received any notice from the IRS of an outstanding balance.
However, after the taxpayer provided proof that she had paid taxes for the decedent’s estate, Haus said the real purpose of his visit was that the decedent allegedly had several delinquent tax return filings.
He then asked the taxpayer to complete several documents. The taxpayer called her attorney who told Haus to leave the taxpayer’s home.
Haus then claimed, “I am an IRS agent, I can be at and go into anyone’s house at any time I want to be.”
Before leaving, the agent said she would have one week to satisfy the remaining balance or he would freeze all her assets and put a lien on her house.
The experience left the taxpayer shaken. She contacted the Marion Police Department with concerns the “agent” was trying to scam her.
A police officer then discovered that Haus was in fact an IRS agent, but that he had used a false name. When the officer revealed Haus’s identity, the agent filed a complaint against the officer with the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
TIGTA told a major with the MPD that IRS agents are given alias names to avoid people knowing their true identities.
“She is truly in fear of this man,” the major reported. “What is more concerning, she contacted the IRS, verified she has a zero balance and she indicates that the person she spoke with on the phone had no idea why an agent would be coming to her home.”
When the major asked how the taxpayer could file a complaint against the agent, the TIGTA agent told him that “it would be a waste of her time.”
Haus’s direct supervisor apologized and told the taxpayer on May 4, 2023 that “some things that were said were wrong . . . things never should have gotten this far.” The supervisor confirmed nothing was owed on the estate.
“This weaponized behavior from an IRS agent to an American taxpayer—conducting an unannounced field visit, providing an alias, using deception to secure entry into the taxpayer’s home, abusing his authority, and then filing an Inspector General complaint against a police officer examining that matter—is highly concerning and reveals the degree to which the IRS is broken,” the report concludes.
IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel said the visits were a safety risk and that repealing the policy would “improve overall safety for taxpayers and IRS employees.”