IRS Weaponization Exposed: Massive Witch Hunt Targets Law-Abiding Americans

Liberty Check

• IRS unilaterally changed tax rules retroactively, branding legal conservation easement transactions ‘abusive’ without congressional approval
• Over 1,100 law-abiding taxpayers swept into audits and litigation, forced into bankruptcy, treated like criminals for following the law
• Treasury Inspector General caught IRS backdating documents in illegal activity worth over $68 million in penalties

For nearly 50 years, Americans who participated in conservation easement programs followed the law. They trusted the IRS rules established in 1976 and made permanent in 1980.

Then bureaucrats changed the game — retroactively.

In late 2016, IRS officials who disapproved of these syndicated conservation-easement transactions unilaterally rewrote the rules. Notice 2017-10 didn’t formally abolish the conservation-easement deduction, but it branded a broad category of transactions as “listed transactions,” imposed burdensome disclosure requirements, and opened the door to an aggressive campaign targeting taxpayers who used them.

They retroactively labeled partnerships participating in the program “presumptively abusive.” This enforcement campaign has swept more than 1,100 syndicated conservation-easement disputes into audits and litigation, including roughly 740 cases docketed in U.S. Tax Court and about 400 transactions still under examination as of May 2026.

No proposed rule. No public comment. No vote by anyone accountable to voters.

Just an IRS notice — followed by a 100% audit rate for all transactions of this kind. The result was an abusive enforcement campaign that has now clogged the U.S. Tax Court with more than a thousand cases.

If there are bad actors, of course, they should be punished. A bipartisan Senate Finance Committee investigation identified serious abuses in some syndicated conservation-easement transactions, particularly deals involving inflated land valuations and outsized deductions.

But evidence that some promoters abused the deduction does not give the IRS license to presume that every transaction was fraudulent or that every investor knowingly participated in a tax shelter.

By using cookie-cutter metrics and conducting desk audits, the IRS has harassed law-abiding taxpayers, pressured them to pay tens of millions of dollars in unfair “settlement agreements,” forced some to file for bankruptcy, and treated them like common criminals despite their having followed the law.

The IRS changed tax law after the fact. Congress — not unelected bureaucrats — makes the laws.

Sadly, the IRS continued this aggressive approach during the Biden administration, when the agency received a major infusion of funding and personnel that expanded its enforcement capacity. Rather than correcting the campaign’s procedural and fairness problems, the administration allowed it to continue against taxpayers caught in these long-running conservation-easement disputes.

Perhaps the most ironic part is that the IRS itself was caught engaging in illegal activity. In a May 2026 report, the Treasury Inspector General found seven cases involving backdated penalty-approval documents; the IRS conceded more than $68 million in penalties in those cases.

Even so, IRS officials have frightening leeway to make allegations of tax fraud, then serve as judge, jury, and executioner, forcing people to pay tax bills that aren’t actually owed.

It is a pattern of abuse that Americans have come to recognize: an agency substituting its own policy preferences for the law Congress wrote, then using its enforcement powers to punish law-abiding citizens who relied on the statute as written.

It’s time for Congress to amend tax laws to prohibit after-the-fact tax changes so that trust and fairness in the tax code can be restored. In addition, the IRS should issue clear guidance on how to make a proper donation of a conservation easement and how to prudently value the deduction without creating later controversy.

Finally, the IRS should immediately end the witch hunt against law-abiding taxpayers who were encouraged by Congress and the Treasury Department for decades to participate in conservation easement programs.

Simply put, this is weaponization at its worst — and it is un-American.

The Constitution must be defended.