The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.
The erroneous disclosure was only recently discovered, the people said. The IRS is working with officials from the Treasury Department, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security on the administration’s response.
The IRS confirmed The Washington Post’s reporting in a court filing Wednesday afternoon. Dottie Romo, the tax agency’s chief risk and control officer, wrote in a sworn declaration that the IRS provided confidential taxpayer information even when DHS officials could not provide sufficient data to positively identify a specific individual.
Federal law mandates strict protections of the identities of taxpayers, including the sharing of data within the federal government. Undocumented immigrants have for years paid taxes with assurances from the federal government that doing so would not result in them being targeted by immigration enforcement.
But in a controversial decision, Treasury, which oversees the IRS, in April agreed to provide DHS with the names and addresses of individuals the Trump administration believed to be in the country illegally, pursuant to DHS requests.
Federal courts have since blocked the data-sharing arrangement, holding that it violates taxpayers’ rights, though the government appealed those rulings.
Before the agreement was struck down, DHS requested the addresses of 1.2 million individuals from the IRS. The tax agency responded with data on 47,000 individuals, according to court records.
When the IRS shared the addresses with DHS, it also inadvertently disclosed private information for thousands of taxpayers erroneously, a mistake only recently discovered, said the people familiar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Romo, in her declaration, did not state when the IRS learned of its error. She said the agency notified DHS on Jan. 23, to begin taking steps to “prevent the disclosure or dissemination, and to ensure appropriate disposal, of any data provided to ICE by IRS based on incomplete or insufficient address information.”
She declined to state if the IRS would inform people whose data was illegally disclosed to immigration officials, and said DHS and ICE had agreed to “not inspect, view, use, copy, distribute, rely on, or otherwise act on any return information that has been obtained from or disclosed by IRS” because of the pending litigation.
The affected individuals could be entitled to financial compensation for each time their information was improperly shared. And government officials can personally face stiff civil and criminal penalties for sharing confidential tax information.
Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of President Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals.
Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison. Trump in January sued the IRS for $10 billion in damages related to the Littlejohn leak.
In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said that under the data-sharing agreement, “the government is finally doing what it should have all along.”
“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the spokesperson said.
There is little evidence that undocumented immigrants have attempted to participate in U.S. elections, nor is there a link between undocumented immigrants and higher levels of crime.
“With the IRS information specifically, DHS plans to focus on enforcing long-neglected criminal laws that apply to illegal aliens,” the DHS spokesperson said.
Treasury and Justice Department spokespeople declined to comment, citing agency policies not to comment on active litigation. The Office of the Deputy Attorney General is monitoring the ongoing litigation, but the office is not making any decisions on the matter, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
When the IRS began conversations with DHS over data sharing shortly after Trump returned to the White House, senior IRS employees warned administration officials that the program was likely illegal and could sweep up misidentified people, The Post has reported.
During early meetings on the project, one agency staffer asked immigration authorities how many people with the same name may live in the same state, according to one of the people, illustrating how easy it would be for the Trump administration to inadvertently breach taxpayers’ privacy, including those who are not targets of immigration investigations.
The IRS’s privacy department was largely sidelined from the talks, two of the people said, and its IT department took over implementing the data sharing. That team had largely been taken over by officials from Trump’s U.S. DOGE Service, the White House’s “efficiency” office charged with shrinking the federal government.
Treasury officials justified the data-sharing agreement by arguing immigration enforcement was pursuing individuals who had violated criminal statutes, though immigration violations are generally civil, not criminal.
Under the arrangement, DHS would provide the IRS with the name and address of a taxpayer. The IRS would then cross-reference that information with its confidential databases and confirm the taxpayers’ last known address.
Immigration officials said the procedure was necessary because DHS lacked reliable information to locate individuals the Trump administration wanted to detain and deport, according to numerous IRS and DHS officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
“This allegedly unauthorized viewing involves personal information that taxpayers provided to the IRS pursuant to a promise that the IRS would prioritize keeping the information confidential,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a November order. “A reasonable taxpayer would likely find it highly offensive to discover that the IRS now intends to share that information permissively because it has replaced its promise of confidentiality with a policy of disclosure.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
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