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Shocking reports say nearly 20% of Congress members are trading stocks that involve insider knowledge and major conflicts of interest, while a watchdog group will probe IRS after hundreds of employees failed to pay taxes.
Nearly one-fifth of the members of Congress have been trading shares of stock that belong to companies they are responsible for overseeing as part of their committee assignments, a new report has found.
This revelation means these members of Congress potentially have insider information that would create a major conflict of interest, according to the findings of a new report by the New York Times published on Tuesday.
“Between 2019 and 2021, 97 US senators and Congress members or their immediate family made financial transactions in which they may have had access to inside information,” according to the Times.
Further, a total of 13 lawmakers traded shares of companies that were under investigation by committees they served on, the New York Post reported.
As an example, in March 2020, the wife of Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) sold shares of Boeing a day before a committee her husband sat on released a report alleging Boeing leadership was partly to blame for two fatal 737 MAX crashes.
At least 10% of the trades made by members of Congress presented a conflict of interest, according to the report.
The Post reported that the analysis doesn’t capture all of the problematic trades. For example, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has purchased shares of companies such as Amazon and Meta, which his wife is responsible for regulating. However, since Pelosi does not sit on the committee, she was not included in the study.
Under the STOCK Act, which is the only legislation providing regulations for lawmakers’ trades, most members of Congress have no restrictions against making trades that might conflict with their legislative duties – as long as they disclose the information within 45 days.
High-ranking staffers told the Post the likelihood Congress would pass legislation to regulate itself is extremely low.
While many people are concerned that the IRS will soon hire 87,000 new agents that they believe will start auditing the middle-class and low-earners, it appears the agency isn’t monitoring its own employees very closely, a watchdog group has found.
An audit will be initiated at the request of Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), which will unleash the Department of Treasury’s internal watchdog group to audit the Internal Revenue Service to make sure its own agents are paying its taxes.
It comes after the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration previously found that hundreds of IRS employees may have failed to pay their own taxes and some of their excuses are pretty unbelievable.
Some employees said they didn’t file their taxes because they didn’t know how. Worse, even after this discovery, which resulted in several employees being fired for “willful failure to properly file their Federal tax returns,” some of these tax-dodgers were actually hired a second time!
“Ironically, hundreds of employees at the IRS itself may have willfully failed to pay their taxes,” Senator Ernst said on Wednesday. “More than 300 of these were repeat offenders, yet the tax agency did little to discipline the tax offenders on its payroll.”
Further, the office of Inspector General J. Russell George found that in 2019, 1,250 IRS employees had not paid their tax bills in full or on time. This included hundreds who were willfully delinquent or repeat offenders. According to George, the IRS had “done little to discipline these tax cheats on its own payroll.”
