When the IRS obtained a biz reporter’s phone records

Gregory Millman of The Wall Street Journal writes about the time that the Internal Revenue Service secretly obtained his phone records.

Millman writes, “My first-hand experience of this came when agents of the Secret Service (then part of the Treasury Department, now part of the Department of Homeland Security) appeared at my door in 1991. I was a freelance journalist at the time, and had written a story about a tax issue for a now-defunct magazine called ‘Corporate Finance.’ Two agents in suits knocked on my back door one autumn day as the children were sitting down to lunch, came in and urged me to identify my sources for the story, in which I had cited an Internal Revenue Service memo. When I refused to identify anyone, the agents told me I could wind up spending five years in prison. I didn’t know at the time that they already had a record of every phone call I had made.

“At the request of the IRS, my telephone company had already turned over my phone records covering an unspecified period, and agents had been at work identifying calls to numbers they thought might be leads. They seem to have thought my source was in the Washington-Maryland area, because after finding numbers I had called in that area they went after the records of calls made from those numbers, as holders of those numbers later told me. That’s how they happened to scoop up the phone records of a home builder, a trade association of corporate finance officers, an old friend who happened to live in Washington, D.C., and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which supports investigative journalism and which I had called to discuss a fellowship. None of these people or organizations had anything to do with the story at issue, and none learned until long afterward that IRS investigators had been secretly riffling through records of all their phone calls.

“I never received any official notice about that either. My attorney only learned of it accidentally. In what may be another good example of government waste and duplication, several months after the IRS had started going through the phone records, the Department of Justice launched its own investigation. In keeping with the DOJ’s policy, in mid-January of 1992 I got a notice that it wanted my records. We went to court to fight, lost, and the records were in the hands of the prosecutors by the end of the month. In the course of our fight, my attorney learned from my phone company that it had already turned the records over to the IRS months before.”

Read more here.