Thursday, May 23, 2013

You'd think this would be news




A lurid but vague class action accuses corrupt and abusive IRS agents of stealing 10 million people's medical records without a warrant - including "intimate medical records of every state judge in California."
     

John Doe Company sued 15 John Doe IRS agents in Superior Court.
     

"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 states. "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.
 

     "No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA [sic: recte HIPAA] facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records. The IRS agents ignored and discarded each of these warnings, ignored their own published and public-reliant rules and governing ethical requirements, and ignored the limitations of the court's search warrant authorization, seizing the records under threat of destroying company property."
 

     Plaintiff's attorney Robert E. Barnes declined to elaborate on the complaint's allegations, saying he will have more information "in a few months."
 

     "I had to file to protect against the statute of limitations being an issue, but am still investigating all facts," Barnes told Courthouse News in an email.
 

     The putative class claims the IRS agents' seizure of medical records violated the 4th Amendment.
 

     "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 states.

Read the rest..............

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