WASHINGTON — The IRS violated the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information “about 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal judge said Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar Cutelli found that the IRS wrongly shared taxpayer information on thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the agencies’ controversial agreement to share information about immigrants for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the United States.
Its findings were based on an announcement made by Dottie Romo, the IRS’s chief risk and oversight officer, earlier this month, which revealed that the IRS provided the Department of Homeland Security with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people requested by ICE — and in most of those cases, ICE gave additional address information in violation of privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data.
The agency violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal law, “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing a taxpayer’s last known addresses to ICE,” Kollar-Kotely said in her decision Thursday. She called Romo’s announcement “an important development in this issue.”
“Not only did the IRS fail to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose taxpayers’ confidential addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for this information was clearly deficient,” she wrote.
The government is appealing the case, but Thursday’s ruling is important because Romo’s announcement supports the appeal decision.
“This confirms what we’ve been saying all along: that the IRS has an illegal policy that violates the protections of the Internal Revenue Code by disclosing these addresses in a way that violates the law’s requirements,” says Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which sued the government over the disclosure.
Representatives for the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to AP’s requests for comment.
A data-sharing agreement signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Besent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last April allows ICE to submit the names and addresses of immigrants inside the United States illegally to the IRS for verification of tax records. The deal led to the resignation of the then-acting IRS commissioner.
There are several ongoing cases challenging the IRS-DHS agreement.
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 the immigrant rights group, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, and other nonprofits suing the federal government to stop implementation of the agreement.
In denying the preliminary injunction request, Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that the nonprofit groups are “unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim,” since the information the agencies share is not covered by the IRS Privacy Act.
However, two separate court orders barred the agencies from massive transfers of taxpayer information and barred ICE from acting on any IRS data in its possession. Those initial orders remain in effect.
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