Tom Van Hoose has owned Highwood Creed Outfitters in Great Falls, Montana for 13 years. As he pulled into work Wednesday morning, twenty heavily armed Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division agents swarmed his store. He tells TTAG that the IRS agents, in full battle rattle, had been mustered from as far away as Denver and Idaho to serve a warrant for his financial records.
He told us the IRS claims that he has under-reported and failed to report millions of dollars of income. Mr. Van Hoose denied that categorically and told us that anyone who knows anything about the gun business knows there’s not a lot of extra revenue in running a retail gun store and range.
Highwood Creek Outfitters was closed down Wednesday while the agents rifled through his records. The IRS CID troops took ten hours to copy the information on his computers and download his point of sale software information. But what Van Hoose says really concerns him is the fact that in addition to his accounting and sales records, the agents confiscated 13 years of 4473 forms and copied his firearm acquisition and disposition book.
Anyone who’s ever completed a 4473 form knows there’s no revenue or financial data there. That form is a record of a firearm purchase transaction used to facilitate a NICS background check and potentially trace a gun’s ownership down the road if it’s used in a crime. Gun dealers are required to keep those forms for at least 20 years.
The question then is, why would the IRS want customer transaction information? Van Hoose tells us the 4473 forms were not included on the list of financial records specifically listed on the warrant the IRS agents served him during the raid. Yet they took them anyway.
Concerned about handing over his firearm transaction records, Van Hoose told me he called Kirk Nelson, the ATF Area Supervisor in Helena, Montana with whom he said he’s always had a good working relationship. Nelson initially told him he didn’t have to turn over the 4473 forms as they don’t contain financial information and weren’t listed on the warrant. But after some further discussion with the IRS agents on the scene, Nelson changed his tune and told Van Hoose to hand them over.
Mr. Van Hoose estimates that his store generates between 1500 and 2000 4473 forms a year, and that’s been pretty consistent — aside from the COVID gun sales boom — since he started the business 13 years ago. That means the Internal Revenue Service now has tens of thousands of gun sales records for Highwood Creek’s customers. And again, the IRS agents took them despite the warrant not listing 4473 forms as part of the records they were looking for.
I called the agent in charge of the investigation to ask about the 4473s and got a call back from the IRS’s Karen Gurgel, a Special Agent and Public Information Officer in Denver. All she would say is that the raid was part of IRS “official business” and that Mr. Van Hoose got a receipt for all of the records that were taken on Wednesday.
Van Hoose confirms the receipt he received for the confiscated records includes the 4473 forms.
As you can probably imagine, Mr. Van Hoose is concerned about his customers’ individual information being in the hands of a government agency and he’s gotten a number of elected officials involved in trying to get answers. That includes Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Congressman Matt Rosendale who visited the store on Friday. Van Hoose is also attempting to enlist the help of Senator Steve Daines.
According to montanarightnow.com, Rep. Rosendale has written a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelback and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel looking for answers.
“Under Director Dettelbach’s leadership of the ATF, a pattern of intimidation and harassment against hardworking Americans has emerged – Montanans will not tolerate these political witch hunts. I remind both Director Dettelbach and Commissioner Werfel that Congress has the power of the purse, and I will ensure that funding for these agencies is not weaponized against the American people,” Rosendale said in his letter.
Van Hoose had Highwood Creek Outfitters back up and running as usual on Thursday morning. He wants his customers to know that whatever prompted the IRS raid, he’s still very much in business.
He told us he intends to fight the IRS on this to recover his 4473s and he expects the legal bills to run into six figures. He’ll be establishing a GiveSendGo campaign to help raise funds to pay the attorneys. When that’s been established, we’ll add that information to this post for those who would like to help in the effort.
