Late last week Mr. Griffin filed an amended version of his lawsuit against the tax agency for the “unlawful disclosure” of his confidential tax information. The hedge fund operator is one of the thousands of wealthy Americans whose private tax data was stolen from the IRS, then leaked and published by the left-leaning ProPublica website.
Mr. Griffin’s original suit in December held the IRS responsible for the leak, citing the ways the agency had flouted Congressional requirements for security. The suit alleges that the IRS also ignored a decade of annual warnings by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta) that security deficiencies were the agency’s “number one major management and performance challenge area.”
Lawyers for the IRS in April asked a judge to dismiss Mr. Griffin’s complaint, which it said was based on “unsupported speculation” that “IRS personnel” had “hacked the IRS’s data.” It said Mr. Griffin couldn’t even prove there was a “data breach at the IRS”; or that the information had been stolen from the IRS (instead of from his own “accountant”); or even that his actual “return information” had been given to ProPublica.