Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler are longtime IRS employees who came forward as whistleblowers to accuse the agency of allowing Hunter Biden to skate on serious tax charges. Here, the two explain why they want to be a part of a civil suit the president’s son filed against the IRS — to defend strongly what the government won’t.
Like most whistleblowers, we did not wake up one morning and decide to pick a fight.
We simply tried to do our jobs like always, even in the face of increasing resistance from a system that did not want to treat the president’s son the same as any other taxpayer.
The foundation of our tax system requires that everyone be treated equally.
Telling the truth about that to our leadership at the IRS, to internal agency watchdogs, and eventually to Congress is our sworn duty — not just something we are allowed to do, but something we must do.
In theory, the law encourages agents like us to report misconduct by promising that we will be protected from retaliation for making those disclosures.
But in practice, the system has reacted instinctively to protect itself instead.
As soon as we came forward, attorneys for Hunter Biden launched a relentless campaign of false accusations, lobbying his father’s Justice Department to investigate and prosecute us for supposedly violating the taxpayer privacy law, even though that law also authorizes disclosures like ours.
When that didn’t work, they filed a civil suit against the IRS.
It’s full of bogus claims about us with zero legal or factual support.
Normally, the government would simply move to dismiss a nuisance suit like this, and normally we could rely on Justice Department attorneys to vigorously represent the interests of both the IRS and its agents like us.
But this case is not normal. The government only moved to dismiss some of the claims and failed to explain to the court that all our disclosures are explicitly authorized and protected by statute.
Our conduct is the core issue in the suit, but because we are not technically parties, we have had to sit on the sidelines and wait for the same Justice Department and IRS that we blew the whistle on to fully defend our actions in court.
That didn’t happen.
So we are now asking to join the case.
It’s a significant step that might seem unusual because, generally, people try to avoid the risks inherent in litigation. Why, then, would we try to join a lawsuit where we aren’t named as defendants?
Tellingly, both sides oppose allowing us an opportunity to join and be heard by the court.
But denying us an official voice to defend our actions would be a mistake and fundamentally unfair.
We need a chance to move for dismissal and make key arguments that the government chose not to make — arguments that are essential to protect us from real harm to our careers.
Otherwise, this lawsuit would become another tool to retaliate against us for telling the truth.
This country needs public servants who are free to speak up when they see threats to equal application of the law.
We carefully followed the rules every step of the way to report misconduct through the proper channels.
Our training taught us that we are obligated to do that and promised we would be protected from retribution if we did.
That promise must be kept if anyone is expected to trust the system enough to blow the whistle in the future.
The harassment that would result from allowing baseless lawsuits like this to proceed would intimidate others and chill the very disclosures that the law is supposed to encourage.
Even if the government is acting like it’s okay with that, we are not.
So, despite the risks, we are once again forced by principle and circumstances to take a difficult step into a controversy we did not seek.
There is more at risk than our own interests because without insiders like us willing to report wrongdoing to the proper authorities, good luck holding the government accountable ever again.