The Internal Revenue Service has issued an unprecedented apology for leaking billionaire investor Ken Griffin’s tax returns to the press.
The apology comes after the Citadel CEO settled a lawsuit he filed against the IRS in 2022 on Monday. The suit alleges that an IRS employee illegally leaked his tax returns to the news site ProPublica.
In 2021, ProPublica also published tax information for other billionaires, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and real estate mogul Stephen Ross, in a series called “The Secret IRS Files.”
The IRS employee in question, government contractor Charles Littlejohn, also leaked confidential tax returns of thousands of other wealthy Americans to the New York Times.
The former government contractor pleaded guilty to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and was sentenced to five years in prison in January.
“The IRS takes its responsibilities seriously and acknowledges that it failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct and Mr. Griffin’s unlawful disclosure of confidential data,” the IRS said in a statement.
“Accordingly, the IRS assures Mr. Griffin and other victims of Mr. Littlejohn’s conduct that it has made significant investments in data security to better protect taxpayer information.”
Littlejohn accessed tax data through IRS databases and uploaded it to a private website to get around agency barriers to large downloads. He provided former President Donald Trump’s tax information to The New York Times and information on others, including Griffin, to ProPublica.
“He violated the terms of his contract and betrayed the trust the American public places in the IRS to safeguard their confidential information,” the IRS said in a statement.
The billionaire’s lawyer, William A. Burke of the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said the lawsuit comes after years of stonewalling.
“While the IRS has acknowledged its failures, apologized to the thousands of Americans affected, and promised to continue to protect taxpayer information, it is important that we all hold the IRS accountable to deliver on that promise,” Burke told The Post in a statement.
“I thank my team for winning an outcome that better protects the American taxpayer and ultimately benefits all Americans,” Griffin said in a statement to multiple news outlets on Tuesday, including CBS and Fox.
