WASHINGTON (AP) — The Internal Revenue Service violated the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement “approximately 42,695 times,” a federal judge said Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS mistakenly shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of a controversial agreement between the agencies to share immigration information to identify and deport people who are in the U.S. illegally
Her findings were based on a declaration filed earlier this month by Dottie Romo, the IRS’s chief risk and control officer, which showed the IRS had provided the Department of Homeland Security with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people ICE had requested and, in most cases, provided additional address information to ICE in violation of privacy rules designed to protect taxpayer data.
Kollar-Kotelly said in Thursday’s decision that the agency “disclosed the last known taxpayer address to ICE approximately 42,695 times,” violating IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statutes. She called Romo’s statement “a significant development in this case.”
“Not only did the IRS fail to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met statutory requirements, this failure also resulted in the IRS disclosing confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE when the taxpayer address information requested by ICE was clearly defective,” she wrote.
The government is appealing the case, but Thursday’s ruling is significant because of Romo’s statement supporting the appeal decision.
Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which sued the government over the disclosure, said: “This confirms what we have said all along: that the IRS engaged in an unlawful policy that violated the protections of the Internal Revenue Code by publishing these addresses in a manner that violates legal requirements.”
Representatives for the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
Last April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed a data-sharing agreement that allows ICE to submit the names and addresses of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification with tax records. The deal led to the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner at the time.
Several cases are currently challenging the IRS’s agreement with the Department of Homeland Security.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction to immigrant rights group Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and other nonprofits that sued the federal government to halt enforcement of the agreement.
In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that the nonprofits are “unlikely to succeed on their claims” because the information shared by the agencies is not protected by IRS privacy rules.
Still, two separate court orders prevent the agencies from transferring taxpayer information on a large scale and prevent ICE from taking action based on any IRS data in its possession. These preliminary injunctions remain in effect.
