Amid a firestorm about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting conservative groups and wide concern that the tax service will be administering Obamacare, the IRS is also the subject of a California class action lawsuit alleging that 15 of its agents improperly seized 10 million Americans’ medical records from a California health care organization.
Malibu attorney Robert Barnes filed the lawsuit in California Superior Court,in mid-March on behalf of a John Doe Company and individuals whose records were seized according to a report from the Courthouse News Service.
“This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) agents (collectively referred to as ‘Defendants’ herein) during a raid of John Doe Company, in the southern district of California, on March 11, 2011,” the complaint, quoted by Courthouse News, reads. “In a case involving solely a tax matter involving a former employee of the company, these agents stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans, including at least 1,000,000 Californians.”
The complaint explains there was no warrant authorizing the seizure of the medical records and the records were not germane to the IRS search. The complaint alleges that the seizure violated the 4th Amendment, according to the extensive quotes from the complaint complied by Courthouse News.
“These medical records contained intimate and private information of more than 10,000,000 Americans, information that by its nature includes information about treatment for any kind of medical concern, including psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual or drug treatment, and a wide range of medical matters covering the most intimate and private of concerns,” the complaint reads.
Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are looking into the allegations of this lawsuit. “(T)he Committee on Energy and Commerce is investigating allegations that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in the course of executing a search warrant at a California health care provider’s corporate headquarters in March 2011, improperly seized the personal medical records of millions of American citizens in possible violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” members of the committee wrote in a letter to Acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.