As the IRS continues its increasing focus on international tax issues, a new IRS offshore disclosure program announced in December continues to take shape. While the IRS has not made public a full description of the program, details have emerged in comments of IRS officials over the past weeks.

Using the 2009 IRS voluntary disclosure program as a template, the IRS is apparently tweaking the approach that generated approximately 15,000 disclosures in the 2009 effort.

The IRS Criminal Investigative Division (“CI”)–already quite busy
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We have written previously about Senator Grassley’s pointed criticisms of aspects of the IRS whistleblower rules proposed in June 2010. The IRS’s delay in finalizing those rules is a principal reason why the IRS has not yet paid whistleblowers who have come forward since the December 2006 creation of the new IRS Whistleblower Program.

Today, the IRS took a large step to correct one major flaw that Grassley urged be corrected: re-writing a bizarre rule that would deny rewards to valuable whistleblowers who prevent improper refunds, or reduce a credit balance by a taxpayer. From what we can tell, that nonsensical rule was not the creation of the IRS Whistleblower Office, but of others within the IRS.

The IRS today announced a new IRS whistleblower rule to correct that anomaly, to be published for comment in the Federal Register.

Citing many developments in the IRS Large Business and International Division in 2010, Tax Analysts this week named IRS LB&I Commissioner Heather Maloy as its “Tax Person of the Year.”

Among those developments that we have followed previously are the international focus of the restructured LB&I division (formerly known as the Large and Mid-Size Business Division (LMSB)), and the creation of the new Global High Wealth Industry Group within LB&I. That group within LB&I is already is working some very significant IRS Whistleblower cases.

Also mentioned by Tax Notes was one of my favorite IRS professionals who assisted the new IRS Whistleblower Program in its infancy, Stuart Mann:
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Tax whistleblowers using the new IRS Whistleblower Program have reported many instances of tax evasion involving domestic and foreign corporations, partnerships, and trusts, in addition to abusive offshore transactions about which we have written previously. These tax whistleblowers will allow the IRS to reduce the more than $300 billion “tax gap”–the difference between what tax cheats owe, but refuse to pay.

Tax evasion generally entails taxpayers understating taxes in the returns they file. In many cases evasion also entails taxpayers failing to file returns, especially information returns (as opposed to tax returns).

For example, partnership returns (Form 1065) are information returns and as such do not report tax payable. Cases of partnership tax evasion sometimes arise where filing Form 1065 is “overlooked.” In many of these cases, the partners continue to file their own income tax returns, which typically understate taxable income and tax payable, as there are no K-1’s to report.