A whistleblower made this shocking allegation to me last week: the IRS was tipping off members of Congress to corporate takeovers so the elected officials could profit from insider trading.
My snitch also charged that higher-level employees of the IRS also used that information to enrich themselves.
This may sound crazy but remember: Up until a few years ago members of Congress were allowed to trade stock based on information they got while performing their public duties.
It wasn’t until 2012, during President Obama’s tenure, that the practice was banned.
But the difference between what had been going on legally until 2012 and what my whistleblower is contending is enormous.
Everyone assumed that members of Congress were just profiting from things they happened to learn while working on their committees – that a drug was going to get turned down by the FDA, for instance, or that a company was sniffing around to see how regulators would feel about a merger.
That was bad enough!
What the whistleblower alleges goes well beyond that and is, quite frankly, freakin’.
“Back in 2003-5 a memo was created within the IRS noting who was permitted to participate in ‘insider trading’,” says this whistleblower. “The memo noted that all IRS employees in the executive branch and those one step below (territory managers, etc.) were permitted to participate.”
Source: Paul Caron