IRS Whistleblower Awards Statistics: What Each Fiscal Year’s Numbers Mean

The IRS publishes whistleblower awards statistics showing what it paid each fiscal year and the collected proceeds behind those payments. If you know about income missing from a company’s return or money diverted from its tax payments, those figures show the financial value of information reaching the IRS. Understanding the transactions behind your information is where our work with you begins.

This page follows annual payments from fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2024, including revisions to earlier figures. Our explanation of how an IRS whistleblower reward is calculated covers the requirements for an individual award. The history here answers a different question: what the program has actually reported paying.

The IRS’s fiscal year 2024 report put cumulative awards since 2007 at $1.3 billion and cumulative proceeds at $7.37 billion. Its December 19, 2025 announcement subsequently reported over $1.4 billion in awards and more than $7.86 billion in proceeds.

IRS Whistleblower Award Claim Numbers Versus Payments

The IRS counts whistleblower award claim numbers and payments differently. A claim number identifies a taxpayer-linked claim, while a payment records an award paid. One submission naming several taxpayers can generate several claim numbers, and one payment can cover several claims.

The IRS’s fiscal year 2024 report connects that year’s award payments to 700 claim numbers. Separately, it records 5,660 new submissions that generated 14,926 claim numbers.

The money columns also have different jobs. Award dollars are the reported awards, shown gross in the recent reports. Attributable proceeds are the collections supporting those awards, which may have arrived in a different fiscal year.

For someone in a finance department who knows about several companies or several transactions, that distinction matters. The IRS whistleblower program connects information to particular tax matters and collections. A single account of how money moved can therefore appear under more than one claim number.

IRS Whistleblower Awards by Fiscal Year

The IRS annual reports provide the payment history below. The first table covers the older informant program. The second begins with the Whistleblower Office era. Both retain the agency’s reported award dollars and proceeds, with revised figures identified where they differ.

Old Informant Payments Before the Mandatory Program

The IRS’s old informant payments preceded the mandatory awards created by the Internal Revenue Code’s section 7623(b). Congress established the mandatory framework and the Whistleblower Office in December 2006. The first Office report looked back at these earlier payments.

Whistleblower Office Annual Payments

The Office-era figures combine mandatory and discretionary payments. The fiscal year alone does not identify the award framework: the early Office-era rows still contain only discretionary payments. The later split appears separately below.

Fiscal year 2018 produced the largest total of award dollars in this series, although fiscal year 2016 had more payments. We see the same contrast between fiscal years 2015 and 2016: more payments, fewer award dollars. Counting checks tells only part of the story.

The revised rows replace the original figures for the same year. The revision to fiscal year 2013 changed the payment count and both dollar columns, while the correction to fiscal year 2015 changed the award dollars.

What Is the Average Payout for an IRS Whistleblower?

An IRS whistleblower’s payout depends on the information’s contribution to the money collected. The annual totals combine different award frameworks, and a payment can cover multiple claim numbers. Those totals describe the program, not a typical payment to someone with your information.

The mandatory framework ordinarily pays 15% to 30% of qualifying collected proceeds, based on the whistleblower’s contribution. The IRS also has discretionary award authority outside the mandatory criteria. Which framework applies depends on the tax dispute, and we work through that with you.

The IRS’s award manual connects an award to the information’s contribution and the resulting collections. For the person who understands the books, the useful question is which tax underpayment that knowledge helps establish. We examine that connection with you, including how your information contributes to the money recovered.

A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. Federal tax claims under the Internal Revenue Code use the separate IRS award program instead. The annual tables here describe IRS payments.

Mandatory and Discretionary Award Payments

Mandatory and discretionary awards have very different dollar profiles in the recent annual reports. In fiscal year 2024, the mandatory framework produced fewer payments and substantially more award dollars. The split shows where the award money went.

The mandatory payments in the final row rested on $457,459,645 in proceeds, while the discretionary payments rested on $17,217,364. The IRS reported a combined award-to-proceeds ratio of 26% for that year. That ratio describes the mix of payments in the report, while an individual award depends on the particular information and collections.

Payments for Completed Parts of a Claim

The IRS can separate completed tax actions from a larger submission and pay an award on those portions. Its fiscal year 2024 report attributed $109.4 million in award dollars to these separate determinations, a practice it calls disaggregation.

For an insider who knows about several entities or tax years, that explains another feature of the payment count. One submission can lead to awards on completed parts while other tax actions continue. The information may describe a connected set of transactions, even when the IRS resolves the tax actions separately.

What the Annual IRS Award Totals Measure

The proceeds column reaches beyond unpaid income tax. The IRS’s published definition includes tax, penalties, interest and qualifying amounts collected under other laws within its authority. The annual reports separately identify tax-code and other proceeds, so calling the entire column recovered income tax changes what the number means.

What an IRS Award Table Cannot Show About Your Information

An award table records payments, but the work behind those payments involves understanding information from inside the business. A person who knows why a payment was booked a particular way can explain something a return alone leaves out. That is the connection we pursue with the reader who knows the transaction.

Clash for Cash: The Conflict Over Tax Whistleblower Contracts, published in Villanova Law Review in 2014, examined the limits of relaying an auditor’s questions through an intermediary. The article described concerns that the relay could restrict information gathering compared with direct interaction. The concern was concrete: an auditor’s follow-up question had to reach the whistleblower through another team, and the answer had to come back the same way.

For us, the implication is practical. We want to understand what the records mean to someone who worked with them, how the transaction affected the tax reporting and where the money went. The annual figures show the scale of awards already reported. Your transaction records and knowledge of the tax reporting give us the place to start on your case.

The Numbers Behind Your Tax Information

If you know where the company’s records and its tax reporting diverge, speak with our whistleblower experts about the transactions you understand. We work beside you to build your strongest tax fraud whistleblower case from the transactions behind those numbers. We bring in tax fraud whistleblower lawyers who can pursue the award your information supports and stay with you through the process.