The Journal says the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administrations are working together with U.S. Attorney’s offices in Manhattan and Las Vegas on an investigation into Wynn Resorts, including what safeguards the Las Vegas-based company has in place to prevent money-laundering. The agencies are working to uncover any potential evidence that Wynn may have violated laws as part of its sports-betting and casino gambling operations.

“We are not aware of any investigation of the company and no agency has notified the company that it is under any investigation,” a Wynn Resorts spokesman said in a statement. “As a highly regulated business we are in a constant dialogue with regulators and governmental agencies on a variety of matters and the fact that information is requested from us by a governmental agency in no way implies the accusation of wrongdoing by the company.”

Wynn WYNN is the latest casino operator to find itself the subject of a criminal probe related to money-laundering. The U.S. Treasury Department began investigating Caesars Entertainment CZR for possible violations last year in a probe aimed at the company’s flagship Las Vegas hotel and casino, Caesars Palace. And, earlier in 2013, the Las Vegas Sands LVS agreed to pay more than $47 million to settle a similar probe that involved that casino’s failure to alert the government after a high-stakes gambler made a series of large, suspicious deposits with the casino.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with a statement provided by Wynn Resorts.

A report on Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal revealed the IRS is pushing to tax employees for their free meals. Companies would have to add in the value of free food when calculating employee tax withholding.

News of a potential tax on free meals has many worried in Silicon Valley, where all-you-can eat buffets are a basic recruiting tool. They’re also a subtle way to get employees to work longer hours by giving them no reason for them to leave the office except to sleep.

“Having food available or catered in is kind of expected of most tech firms, so this is a bit of a concern,” admits Steve Sarner, VP of Marketing, at the social networking site Tagged, where employees get at least one free meal a week cooked up by nearby restaurants in San Francisco’s Financial District.

Nathan Spady, a front-end engineer at Weebly, a service that lets users build web sites with custom software tools, called the idea of taxing free food awkward. The practice is a social catalyst that makes it easy for a company’s staff to talk to one another, he said. Weebly makes that easy enough by serving free catered lunch daily.

“You start doing that, well then, do you start taxing free coffee as well?” Spady said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Google, which popularized the free Silicon Valley buffet, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Facebook, which followed in Google’s footsteps by offering its employees free food, declined to comment.

The idea of a food tax rankles Matt MacInnis, CEO of the digital publishing startup Inkling. His company has served its employees free lunches for nearly four years via the catering business Ryan Scott 2 Go. ZeroCater, another caterer, was hired last year to serve dinner. MacInnis argued that free meals in the tech industry are a lot like standard benefits such as employers matching 401k contributions by their workers.

Companies like Google GOOG , Facebook FB , and Apple AAPL can easily afford to pay employees more to cover any additional taxes for free meals, he said. Therefore, their recruiting wouldn’t suffer. But start-ups, which feel compelled to offer free laundry, yoga classes, and free food to compete for top talent, would be put at a big disadvantage, he said. In Inkling’s case, MacInnis says he would need to increase employee’s annual salaries by more than $5,000 to cover any extra food taxes.

“It seems there would be pretty terrible, unintended consequences,” MacInnis said.

The IRS issued rule changes on Wednesday in a move that affects U.S. taxpayers living abroad as well as U.S. residents with offshore accounts. The point of the rule tweaks is to reduce the pressure on taxpayers who fail to report foreign income or assets, but who come forward and admit their error in a timely fashion.

All penalties will be waived for U.S. taxpayers living abroad who mistakenly failed to report their foreign accounts. Meanwhile, taxpayers in the U.S. who have foreign accounts will face fines of only 5% of the total of the assets at issue. Previously, the offshore voluntary compliance programs were not available to taxpayers living in the U.S., while taxpayers living overseas could only take advantage of the reduced penalties if they owed less than $1,500 in unpaid taxes.

The IRS is also increasing penalties for those who evade taxes on their foreign accounts and then don’t come forward quickly. Those who wait until after it becomes clear that federal officials are investigating the bank holding their accounts face penalties of 50% of the balance in those accounts, up from 27.5% previously.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday that the changes are the result of the IRS’s determination that it was imposing penalties that were “were too harsh or restrictive.” The U.S. government has been pushing for better overall tax compliance from taxpayers with accounts overseas for roughly five years and those efforts have led to the IRS collecting roughly $6.5 billion in taxes, interest and penalties from more than 45,000 taxpayers in that time. But, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, some of the government’s strong-arm tactics have also resulted in a record number of U.S. citizens living abroad and green-card holders renouncing their allegiance to the U.S. to avoid what they see as overly harsh penalties.

“Our aim is to get people to disclose their accounts, pay the tax they owe and get right with the government. At the same time, for important categories of these non-willful people with offshore issues, a compliance regime that is too harsh won't net the desired result,” Koskinen said in a statement.