IRC §§ 7431 and 7433: Civil Remedies for Abusive Practices by the IRS

Abstract

A government must have revenue to exist, and a government the size of the present-day United States government requires a staggering amount of revenue. As the revenue assessing and collecting branch of the government, the Internal Revenue Service performs the crucial function of ensuring the steady and continuous flow of revenue. To enable it to perform this function, Congress and the courts have granted the Service broad powers of investigation and seizure that are denied most other law enforcement agencies by statutory and constitutional safeguards, and have generally shielded the Service from accountability to the taxpayers involved or to any other authority.
In 1976, however, Congress began enacting legislation intended to ensure the proper exercise by the Service of its extensive powers, and to prevent the misuse of the massive database that the Service has constructed on American taxpayers. Given the ever-expanding use of the tort system in the United States as a means of private law enforcement, it is not surprising that one of the tools chosen by Congress to police the Service was the taxpayer lawsuit for damages against the federal government. This Article will focus on two provisions, section 7431 (and its substantive base, section 6103) and section 7433, in which Congress established this method of accountability.