A federal judge found the Internal Revenue Service has broken the law thousands upon thousands of times by sharing confidential taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a ruling Thursday that found the vast majority of taxpayer addresses shared with ICE in August were provided without the IRS confirming the agency had provided a valid address for the individuals whose records were sought, as required by law, reported the Washington Post.
“The IRS violated the [Internal Revenue Code] approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE ... without confirming that ICE’s request set forth the ‘address of the taxpayer with respect to whom the requested return information relate[d],’” the judge wrote in her opinion.
The requirement exists to make sure the government can access confidential tax records for someone who has already been specifically identified, but ICE's requests frequently contained incomplete addresses or listed jails, detention facilities or prisons without including the street location.
“This confirms what we’ve been saying all along: that the IRS has an unlawful policy that violates the Internal Revenue Code’s protections by releasing these addresses in a way that violates the law’s requirements,” said Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which has sued the government over the ICE sharing agreement.
Olson was surprised by the judge's ruling listing the number of times the IRS had broken the law by disclosing taxpayer information to immigration officials, which the Department of Homeland Security defended as necessary to crack down on illegal immigration.
“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,” DHS said in a prior statement.