IRS Whistleblower Littlejohn—Between Weaponizing And Whistleblowing

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 18: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022 ... [+] in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In the annals of modern whistleblowing, the name Charles Littlejohn is not likely first to come to mind. Nonetheless, Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who exposed the tax avoidance practices of billionaires, is facing a prison sentence of five years—the statutory maximum for the offense he plead guilty to— for what many consider to be making public what never should have been private to begin with.

Charles Edward Littlejohn was a consultant for the IRS, employed intermittently between 2008 and 2013 by a company that was itself an IRS contractor. Through this employment Littlejohn had access to vast troves of unmasked taxpayer data, including tax returns and return information for high net-worth individuals.

In 2017 Littlejohn sought re-employment with the IRS contractor for the express purpose, according to the government, of accessing and disclosing tax information related to a high-ranking government official—assumed by many to be former President Donald Trump. Once Littlejohn obtained access to the IRS databases he exploited loopholes to avoid detection by the IRS privacy protocols; these steps included avoiding searching for the high-ranking government official by name and instead relying on general search parameters that would nonetheless return the information of the target.

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