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Comment by pjfin123 | Hacker News Reader

How has all this information form the IRS leaked? ProPublica seems to have accessed many of the richest American's tax data. Is this something one person could do? How many people have that kind of access?

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An IRS insider leaked it, obviously. Super illegal and against the IRS culture, but now it's out there.

What's puzzling is how apparently selective the leaked material all is. ProPublica has all these very specific memos and tax return info about Thiel's Roth IRA, and yet, they are only aware of Thiel's long IRS mega-audit (and that he won 100%), and don't know that it was in fact all about auditing his use of the Roth IRA trick? (Or that Fortune reported about the Paypal mafia's use of the Roth IRA back in like 2009?) Very odd.

Why do they have info about his Roth IRA anyway? That wouldn't be part of a tax record. Maybe it's from the audit?

(Similar issues came up when people wanted to see Trump's tax returns to find out "if he was really wealthy". They wouldn't show that. Of course they might show a lot of other things.)

Part of the article mentioned the IRA was disclosed in his application for New Zealand residency. So does NZ publish residency applications? Or was that also leaked?

Not commenting on the morality of the leak but given the IRS has been gutted [0] over the years by those in power, perhaps this insider was sick of seeing the public narrative on taxes be completely different from what was happening privately.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted

Based on their claims of how they validated it by comparing the data with 60 some persons whos tax filings were public (e.g. politicans) it would be reasonable to assume that ProPublica received detailed tax records on a considerable fraction of all Americans. Certainly whomever collected the data had access to that.

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