As part of settling a lawsuit, the IRS has issued a public apology, something it almost never does, despite there being a lot for the agency to apologize for.
“The Internal Revenue Service sincerely apologizes to Mr. Kenneth Griffin and the thousands of other Americans whose personal information was leaked to the press,” the tax-collection agency said on Tuesday. The statement is part of a settlement the IRS reached with billionaire hedge-fund manager Griffin after IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Griffin’s tax information, which was published in ProPublica in 2021.
“The IRS takes its responsibilities seriously and acknowledges that it failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct and unlawful disclosure of Mr. Griffin’s confidential data,” the statement said. “Accordingly, the IRS assures Mr. Griffin and the other victims of Mr. Littlejohn’s actions that it has made substantial investments in its data security to strengthen its safeguarding of taxpayer information.”
Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison earlier this year for leaking the tax information. In addition to Griffin, he also leaked tax information of Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others.
Griffin’s goal with his lawsuit, filed in December 2022, was to get a public apology and stronger IRS data security. “I am grateful to my team for securing an outcome that will better protect American taxpayers and that will ultimately benefit all Americans,” Griffin said, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
IRS apologies should be more common. The IRS fails at the most basic tasks, such as in 2023 when it dragged its feet on determining whether state-tax rebates would be counted as taxable income. According to the IRS Taxpayer Advocate’s 2023 report to Congress, the IRS has a backlog of 6 million pieces of mail, and only 29 percent of phone calls it receives are answered by live people. The data-privacy issue that Griffin was raising in his lawsuit has been the subject of reports from the Government Accountability Office and the IRS inspector general for years, with little to no action taken by the IRS to fix the problem.
Good for Griffin on extracting an apology from the IRS and forcing some improvements in its data security. There ought to be more apologies on the way for the agency’s incompetence in its dealings with millions of Americans every year.