A federal judge in the United States has ruled that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information “approximately 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In a decision issued on Thursday, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS had erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people, in apparent violation of the Internal Revenue Code.
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The ruling cited IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, which largely prohibits the disclosure of tax return information without consent.
Kollar-Kotelly said that the IRS violated that law “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE”.
“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.
Her finding is based on a declaration filed earlier this month by Dottie Romo, the chief risk and control officer for the IRS, which revealed that the IRS had provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information on 47,000 of the 1.28 million people that ICE had requested.
In most of those cases, Romo said, the tax agency gave ICE additional address information in violation of privacy rules created to protect taxpayer data.
The government is appealing the case, but the Thursday ruling is significant because Romo’s declaration supports the decision on appeal.
Kollar-Kotelly, meanwhile, called the Romo declaration “a significant development in this case”.
What agreement does the IRS have with ICE?
The case is the result of a growing effort under the administration of President Donald Trump to consolidate government data, alarming rights advocates who fear an erosion of taxpayer privacy.
Part of that data has been used to carry out Trump’s campaign of mass deportation, a key pillar of his second-term agenda.
On April 7, the IRS entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Homeland Security to help with “non-tax criminal enforcement”.
That agreement, however, was widely understood to be the groundwork for the identification and deportation of immigrants in the US through taxpayer data.
The Center for Taxpayer Right sued the government over the disclosure, citing protections instituted after the 1972 Watergate scandal revealed how former President Richard Nixon misused tax data during his term.
“This nation already once experienced a President who sought to collect tax information on his political allies and enemies in the White House for use for favor and punishment,” the centre wrote in an initial complaint.
“Following the Watergate era, Congress clearly and unequivocally acted to protect the American people from these intrusions.”
It argued that taxpayer data is uniquely sensitive and “in grave jeopardy” of being shared broadly across the government.
Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, said after Thursday’s ruling, “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.”
Representatives from the IRS and the Department of the Treasury did not respond to The Associated Press’s requests for comment.
Currently, the data-sharing agreement allows ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the US illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records.
The deal, signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, led the then-acting commissioner of the IRS to resign.
There are several ongoing cases that challenge the agreement between the IRS and immigration authorities.
Earlier this week, a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction for the immigrants’ rights group Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and other nonprofits as they sue the federal government to stop implementation of the agreement.
In declining the preliminary injunction request, Judge Harry T Edwards wrote that the nonprofit groups “are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim”, since the information the agencies are sharing isn’t covered by the IRS privacy statute.
Still, two separate court orders have blocked the agencies from massive transfers of taxpayer information and blocked ICE from acting upon any IRS data in its possession. Those preliminary injunctions are still in place.