The Whistleblower Program Helps Identify Tax Noncompliance; However, Improvements Are Needed to Ensure That Claims Are Processed Appropriately and Expeditiously (Reference Number 2016-30-059)

TIGTA audit report 2016-30-059 (30 Aug 2016, 73 PDF pp.; management response pp. 61-66 are images, OCR'd). Programme content extracted: 7623(a)/(b) rules and pre-2010 discretionary policy; WO staffing by unit FY2011-2015 (Figure 1, values read from a stacked bar chart, units assigned by segment colour); submissions and claims by designation FY2011-2016 (Figures 2-3); closure reasons FY2015-2016 (Figure 4); claims per whistleblower and status of claims FY2013-2015 (Figures 5-6); award rate of collected proceeds (Figure 7; collections, awards and counts already recorded); days to establish submissions (Figure 8; counts already recorded); SB/SE classification volumes and backlogs; Form 11369 and rejection-letter backlogs; December 2015 cleanup; cycle-time estimates (Figure 11, Appendix V); claim-population and error-rate estimates (Figure 12, Appendix VI, p. 26); open claims Oct 2015; IRS-connected whistleblowers (Figure 13); processing targets; 4 events. Not extracted as rows (judged audit-working or IT detail, not programme statistics): raw audit-sample tallies (debriefing sample 16/6/67/16/7/19/25 of 89 submissions, 14 and 8 of 22; exception tallies 72 of 135, 10/9/8/13/11/25 etc.; 21, 49, 8, 34, 15 sample claims; 25 interviewees), Figure 12 sample counts (60, 21, 49, 8), E-TRAK downtime (31 times/62 hours 2014, 106 times/307 hours 2015), AIMS coding checks (5,774 modules, 621 = 10.8%, 30-module sample with 22 and 13, SB/SE 306, 3,378 of 8,009, 1,500 of 7,548, 504 of 5,136, 104 of 5,883), procedural alerts (8 in FY2014, 11 in FY2015), tax-gap estimates ($458/$52/$406 billion), the 18-/13-month statute criteria, and the 24-month estimate in the management response. Figure 9 and Figure 10 are charts without printed values (their peaks are given in the text and extracted). All printed tables checked: parts add up to totals. Added 202 observations, 17 rules, 4 events, 2 proposed indicators (whistleblowers_filing, claims_processed_step). Rules restated from other sources are now recorded from this document too (decision 8).