Here’s an interesting column from John Hinman, a 39-year veteran of the Internal Revenue Service who recently took on the role of director of the IRS Whistleblower Office. If you’ve never heard of this part of the IRS, it was created by the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, and since its inception in 2007, has helped collect more than $6.39 billion from non-compliant taxpayers, using information submitted by whistleblowers. In return, more than 2,500 whistleblowers have been paid awards ranging from 15 to 30% of the amounts collected — a total of more than $1 billion in awards. “The IRS uses increasingly sophisticated data analytics and other methods to detect non-compliance with tax laws, but we can’t find it all by ourselves,” Hinman writes. “We need help from whistleblowers – people with firsthand knowledge of non-compliance who are willing to share what they know with us so we can investigate it when warranted.”