A federal judge determined the Internal Revenue Service violated federal privacy laws by improperly sharing confidential taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than 42,000 times. The violations stem from a controversial data-sharing agreement between the IRS and Department of Homeland Security aimed at identifying immigrants in the country illegally.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service violated federal law by improperly sharing private taxpayer information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on “approximately 42,695” occasions.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly determined that the IRS illegally provided confidential taxpayer data for thousands of individuals to the Department of Homeland Security through a disputed information-sharing arrangement between the agencies designed to locate and remove immigrants living in the United States without authorization.
The judge’s determination stems from a court filing submitted this month by Dottie Romo, the IRS’ chief risk and control officer, which disclosed that the tax agency had furnished DHS with data on 47,000 individuals out of 1.28 million people ICE had requested information about — and in the majority of instances, provided ICE with supplementary address details that violated privacy regulations protecting taxpayer information.
In her Thursday decision, Kollar-Kotelly stated that the agency breached IRS Code 6103, among the most stringent confidentiality statutes in federal law, “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE.” She described the Romo filing as “a significant development in this case.”
“The IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient,” she wrote.
While the government is challenging the case on appeal, Thursday’s decision carries weight because Romo’s filing bolsters the ruling during the appeals process.
Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which has filed suit against the government regarding the information sharing, says “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.”
Officials from the IRS and Treasury Department did not provide responses to Associated Press inquiries seeking comment.
An information-sharing compact executed last April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem permits ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants residing in the U.S. without legal status to the IRS for verification against tax documentation. The arrangement prompted the then-acting IRS commissioner to step down.
Multiple ongoing legal challenges are contesting the IRS-DHS information-sharing arrangement.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a request for a preliminary injunction from the immigrants’ rights organization Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and other nonprofit organizations suing the federal government to halt the agreement’s implementation.
In rejecting the preliminary injunction petition, Judge Harry T. Edwards stated that the nonprofit organizations “are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim,” because the data the agencies are exchanging falls outside the scope of the IRS privacy law.
Nevertheless, two distinct court orders have prevented the agencies from conducting large-scale transfers of taxpayer data and prohibited ICE from taking action based on any IRS information in its possession. Those preliminary injunctions remain active.