Lest I be misunderstood, I am all in favor of whistleblowers. I said it long ago: the information may be publicly available, but so what? “(I)t needs the whistleblower to connect the dots. Some dots may be public, some private, some hidden, some in plain sight. But in the immortal words of the late great Bill Klem, “Some is balls and some is strikes, but they ain’t nuthin’ till I calls ‘em.” Somebody has to call ‘em, or at least put it all together, so the party charged with “callin’ ‘em” can in fact call ‘em.” See my blogpost “Qui Tam?” 9/12/12.

That said, I am no fan of the stripminer who conjoins his EDGAR and Wall Street Journal subscriptions with his on-the-job training at an accounting firm that does Section 482 work to try to extract cash from the public fisc with hand-me-down info and unsubstantiated theories.

Hence when Judge Albert G. (“Scholar Al’) Lauber curb-kicks Whistleblower 20442-18W, T. C. Memo. 2025-86, filed 8/11/25, I’ve no sympathy for said blower.

“Respondent contends that petitioner’s information did not ‘substantially contribute’ to the adjustments made by the examination teams, and we agree. In analyzing this question, it is helpful to focus first on the character of the information petitioner supplied. He had no inside knowledge about Target or its tax planning. He had no involvement in the preparation of Target’s financial statements or tax returns and no access to its internal documents. Virtually all the information he supplied was derived from publicly available sources, such as newspaper articles, business journals, and SEC filings.

“Petitioner was employed by a firm that did SEC filings for large multinational corporations. Given his experience, he was able to scrutinize Target’s SEC filings and make an educated guess about transfer pricing issues that might arise during an IRS audit. Petitioner presumably could have reviewed SEC filings by dozens or hundreds of other large multinational corporations, made educated guesses about transfer pricing issues they might have, and filed whistleblower claims targeting them.

“By its nature, high-level information of this sort is unlikely to be of great use to experienced IRS examiners who are auditing large multinational companies. And that was what the exam teams found here.” T. C. Memo. 2025-85, at p. 14.

Mike Lissack’s up-and-down safari with Reg. Section 301.7623-2(b)(1) and its “substantially contributes” language gets an airing. This blower fails on that score. Again, for full disclosure, Mr. Lissack was a client of mine many years ago in an entirely unrelated matter.

In short, bravo to the blowers who risk all for truth, justice, and the American way. But no praises for the stripminer and bounty hunter who “habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket.”