IRS apologizes to billionaire Ken Griffin for leaking his tax records

The IRS issued a rare apology to billionaire investor Ken Griffin for leaking his tax records to the press, as well as to other taxpayers whose information was breached, the tax agency said in a statement Tuesday .

“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 IRS said.

The apology stems from the case of a former IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced earlier this year to five years in prison for unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. Littlejohn had provided information about the tax returns of Griffin and other wealthy Americans to the nonprofit news organization ProPublica.

In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, Griffin said, “I am grateful to my team for achieving an outcome that will better protect American taxpayers and ultimately benefit all Americans.” »

Starting in 2021, ProPublica published a series called “The Secret IRS Files”, which included details of the tax returns of thousands of wealthy taxpayers, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk. The report explored how some of the richest Americans minimize their taxes.

Littlejohn “violated the terms of his contract and betrayed the trust the American people place in the IRS to protect their sensitive information,” the agency said in a statement released Tuesday. “The IRS takes its responsibilities seriously and recognizes that it failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct and the unlawful disclosure of Mr. Griffin’s confidential data.”

Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, has nearly $42 billion, making him the 34th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The IRS apology comes after Griffin on Monday dropped a lawsuit against the agency and the U.S. Treasury Department that he filed in December for violations.

“As we reported on the first day the series was published, we did not know the identity of the source who provided this trove of IRS files,” a ProPublica spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. “After careful deliberation, ProPublica published select, newsworthy tax details about some of the wealthiest Americans to inform the debate over the fairness of our tax system. These stories clearly served the public interest.”

The IRS said it has made “substantial investments in its data security to strengthen the protection of taxpayer information.”

It added: “The agency believes that its actions and the resolution of this matter will result in a stronger and more reliable process for protecting the personal information of all taxpayers.”