A Washington man who worked as a consultant with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has been charged with stealing the confidential tax information of thousands of the wealthiest Americans and leaking it to a news organization.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, had a contract with the IRS from 2018 to 2020 and stole tax returns dating back more than 15 years, including those of a public official, who wasn’t identified, according to charging papers filed in Washington federal court Friday. He faces one count of unlawfully disclosing tax information, a felony punishable by as much as five years in prison.
The filing doesn’t identify the news outlets that allegedly got the information, but the description matches reporting by ProPublica. The investigative journalism outlet in 2021 published reports on billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk based on IRS data it got about “the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.”
ProPublica released a statement declining to comment on the charges against Littlejohn, but said, “As we’ve said previously, ProPublica doesn’t know the identity of the source who provided this trove of information on the taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans.”
One of the billionaires in the ProPublica reporting, Citadel hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, is suing the IRS, seeking to hold the agency liable for the breach of his confidential information.
“The government has a fundamental obligation to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ sensitive information, whether it be tax records or healthcare records,” Griffin said Friday in an emailed statement. “While I continue to be frustrated by the IRS’s failure to protect the personal data it is entrusted with each year, I am grateful” for the U.S. Justice Department’s “persistence in this investigation.”
His lawsuit is pending in Florida federal court, where the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss the case.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, as did Littlejohn’s attorney.
According to the court filing, Littlejohn leaked tax information about the public official to one news organization and the data about wealthy Americans to another. Both published articles describing the information Littlejohn provided, the government said.
Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho, the top Idaho Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said investigators are still determining the extent of the leaks.
“While many questions remain, at the very least, IRS guardrails failed to prevent this brazen breach of taxpayer rights,” Crapo said in a statement. “It goes without saying that resolving these and other ongoing security issues at the IRS, as well as identifying and making whole the individuals impacted by this breach, must be the IRS’s highest priority.”
The case is USA v. Littlejohn, 1:23-cr-00343, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia.
—With assistance from Naomi Jagoda.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
