The IRS has improperly disclosed immigrant tax data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Dottie Romo, the tax agency’s chief risk and control officer, confirmed in sworn testimony that the agency had given information to ICE agents and the Department of Homeland Security, The Washington Post reported. Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Perry Stein, wrote that IRS representatives shared information for thousands of immigrants with ICE officials.
Insiders speaking to The Post say the error had only been recently discovered, but did confirm confidential tax information had been shared with the DHS, even when the department could not provide sufficient details to positively identify a suspect.
Federal law means immigrants can pay taxes with assurances that they would not be targeted by immigration enforcement. This changed when the IRS agreed to share information with the DHS on individuals the Trump administration believed to be in the country illegally.
Federal courts have since blocked the data sharing, though not before the DHS requested 1.2 million individuals' addresses from the IRS. 47,000 data sets had been shared between the IRS and DHS, according to insiders.
While Romo has confirmed there had been a transfer of information between the two departments, she could not confirm when the breach had first been noticed.
By January 23 of this year, Romo says steps were taken 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."
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.
"With the IRS information specifically, DHS plans to focus on enforcing long-neglected criminal laws that apply to illegal aliens."
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, writing in November last year on the alleged tie between the IRS and DHS, suggested taxpayers would not be pleased with how the agencies had conducted themselves.
She wrote, "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.
"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."
Tom Bowman, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, added, "Once taxpayer data is opened to immigration enforcement, mistakes are inevitable and the consequences fall on innocent people.
"The disclosure of thousands of confidential records unfortunately shows precisely why strict legal firewalls exist and have — until now — been treated as an important guardrail."