IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential information to ICE 42,695 times: Judge

WASHINGTON– A federal judge ruled Thursday that the IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information “approximately 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS mistakenly shared the tax information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the agencies’ controversial agreement to share immigrant information for the purpose of identifying and deporting people in the United States illegally.

His conclusion was based on a statement filed earlier this month by IRS Chief Risk and Compliance Officer Dottie Romo, which revealed that the IRS provided DHS with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people requested by ICE — and, in most of those cases, gave ICE additional address information in violation of privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data.

Kollar-Kotelly said in her Thursday ruling that the agency violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest federal privacy laws, “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing taxpayers’ last known addresses to ICE.” She called the Romo statement “a significant development in this matter.”

“Not only did the IRS fail to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met legal requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for such information was clearly deficient,” she wrote.

The government appealed the case, but Thursday’s ruling is significant because Romo’s statement supports the appeal decision.

Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which sued the government over the disclosure, says “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 requirements of the law.” »

Representatives for the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

A data-sharing agreement signed last April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem allows ICE to submit the names and addresses of illegal immigrants in the United States to the IRS for cross-checking against tax records. The deal led the then-IRS commissioner to resign.

Several pending cases challenge the IRS-DHS agreement.

Earlier this week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction against the immigrant rights group, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, and other nonprofits that are suing the federal government to stop implementation of the agreement.

In denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote that the nonprofit groups are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their request because the information shared by the agencies is not covered by the IRS privacy law.

Yet two separate court orders blocked agencies from transferring taxpayer information en masse and blocked ICE from acting on IRS data in its possession. These preliminary injunctions are still in effect.