Every single one of these propublica articles has been preying on people's lack of financial knowledge to push a political agenda.
It even highlights how they're using recent changes in the tax code to claim depreciation on assets that either don't actually depreciate or the value is highly subjective.
It's a lot more than just "Oh boo boo is us our asset lost value last year so now we don't have to pay taxes".
Also, capital gains are assessed relative to the depreciated price of the asset, so if there is a wild divergence between that and market value, the owner will pay a huge tax bill on sale.
This is the problem with the post-Wikileaks concept of "leaked documents". By default, the reader is lead to believe that by a document being leaked it demonstrates something nefarious or shadowy.
We saw this most notably with the Panama Papers and the Podesta emails. No one was directly prosecuted as a result of evidence derived from the wholesale publishing of the material. In the case of Podesta, it revealed absolutely nothing. So much so that a certain group of people became obsessed with innocuous messages about pizza.
The ProPublica IRS hack, in my opinion, is doing nothing for journalism ethics.
Billions of tax dollars have been recovered due to the Panama Papers alone [1]. The Podesta emails were BS, but everyone in the know always have agreed on that.
How you can claim that the ProPublica IRS leak isn't good journalism is unclear to me. In the few articles they've published, they've clearly exposed the nefarious practice of legal tax avoidance using specific leaked information that wasn't documented or widely known before.
[1] https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/panama-pap...
Totally innocuous. I mean, who doesn't write vague messages about pizza and pasta? Who doesn't collect art depicting stylized child abuse? Who isn't friends with convicted child molesters? It's all merely a coincidence.
Of course it's impossible to get direct prosecution from any leaks of vague messages. That doesn't mean they aren't nefarious or shadowy. Here's another totally innocuous message from a high-level "waste-management consultant" in New Jersey: "Hey Paulie, our friend with the hair needs to go".
Genuine, partly-rhetorical: Which of the PRISM stories that came out after the Snowden revelations asserted and proved illegality? IIRC, no one from the government nor any of the C-suite tech executives who secretly approved the surveillance were charged or convicted with anything.
Looking at the lengthy Wikipedia article [0], I see that foreign governments said "nightmarish if true". James Clapper and President Obama himself acknowledged the existence of the program and defended it as passionately and robustly as any of the rich people defending their tax situations.
Should Snowden/Greenwald/Guardian/WaPo held off on publishing the PRISM revelations until they had proof of criminality in hand?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#M...