Currently carries out warrantless searches targeting those ‘associated’ with delinquent taxpayer
Officials with the Rutherford Institute, which fights in the courts for religious and civil liberties, are arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that the IRS needs to be stopped from attacking innocent bystanders.
The organization said it has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case calling for the justices “to restrict the tax agency’s authority to carry out warrantless searches of innocent taxpayers’ bank accounts and financial records as part of its efforts to identify and pursue the funds of associated family members and friends with delinquent taxes.”
“The Supreme Court needs to rein in the IRS’ unconstitutional power grabs,” explained constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of “Battlefield America: The War on the American People.”
“This practice of investigating the bank records of innocent taxpayers because they may have family members or associates who are delinquent on their taxes is merely a perverse form of guilt by association. At a minimum, Fourth Amendment protections should not disappear just because sensitive information is shared with third parties, such as banks and attorneys,” he continued.
The brief was filed in Polselli v. IRS, and argues that the “sweeping investigatory power wielded by the IRS” actually offends “every constitutional sensibility on the right to privacy.”
It’s because the IRS circumvents the Fourth Amendment to carry out warrantless searches of the bank accounts of people – simply because they know or are related to someone else with tax issues.
In the case at hand, an IRS “Revenue Officer” was chasing “underpaid federal taxes” from Remo Polselli.
He served summonses on the banks providing banking services to Polselli’s wife and lawyer “in order to find account and financial records concerning Polselli,” the institute explained.
“The IRS agent did not notify Polselli’s wife or attorney of the summonses, but the banks voluntarily did so,” the report said. “Polselli’s wife and attorney subsequently filed motions in federal district court to quash the IRS’s summonses.”
The district court, however, gave free rein to the IRS, threatening that the wife and lawyer didn’t even have a right to have their efforts to halt the summonses heard.
The 6th U.S. Circuit agreed, and “interpreted a federal statute to rule that the IRS may summon the recordkeeper of any person without notice to that person if the summons was issued in aid of the collection of an assessment against a delinquent taxpayer.”
Rutherford lawyers have suggested, instead, that “the statute should be interpreted consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s privacy values and protections against unreasonable searches so that the IRS cannot sweep up sensitive information of innocent people who coincidentally happen to have the same employer, lawyer, or accountant as a delinquent taxpayer.”
