Federal judge says the IRS broke the law by sharing confidential data with ICE

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is already under heavy scrutiny after the actions of ICE in recent months. However, things got from bad to worse for the government when it was alleged that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) violated federal law several thousand times and shared confidential taxpayer information with the DHS through ICE. The matter is being heard in court currently, and one judge has ruled that the IRS broke the law “approximately 42,695 times.”

As per a Washington Post report, the U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the ruling on Thursday. It was part of the ongoing litigation over data sharing between the IRS and the DHS. The law states that if any government organization wanted to access the taxpayer information of an individual, they’d have to submit the name and address of that individual first. The DHS has been accused of not following the rule with their requests.

The judge wrote that the majority of the nearly 47,300 taxpayer addresses provided by the IRS to the DHS were obtained without the aforementioned condition being met. “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[s],’” Kollar-Kotelly stated.

What’s even more concerning is that Kollar-Kotelly wrote that ICE could have submitted a request with an address like “Don’t Care 12345” or simply “00000” and still received information about a taxpayer. This has led to the government being sued by taxpayer advocates, one of whom is Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights. “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,” she said.

The DHS also released a statement defending its actions, but not a lot of people were convinced. “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 DHS had stated.

Dottie Romo, the chief risk and control officer for the IRS, did not reveal when the tax agency got wind of the information being leaked to the DHS. However, in her declaration, she mentioned that the IRS informed the DHS on January 23 that it intends 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.”

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