Judge Rules IRS Broke the Law ‘Approximately 42,695’ Times By Sharing Confidential Data With ICE

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

A federal judge found that the Internal Revenue Service broke the law “approximately 42,695” times by giving confidential information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s Thursday ruling sharply rebuked the IRS for disclosing confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations “in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient.”

The ruling found that DHS did not follow the federal law requiring the agency requesting taypayer address from the IRS to have specifically identified the individual in question. The requesting agency must provide the IRS with the name and address of the person whose information it seeks to obtain. IRS failed to verify that this information had been provided in the majority of the 47,300 DHS requests.

“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],’” said Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling.

Kollar-Kotelly took it a step further, decrying the IRS’s verification process by claiming ICE could have submitted requests with addresses like “Don’t Care 12345” or “00000” without being denied the information the agency was seeking.

The judge’s ruling was based on a declaration filed by IRS’s chief risk and control officer, Dottie Romo, which claimed that the IRS had improperly given information on thousands of the 1.28 million people that ICE had requested.

In a prior statement to The Washington Post, DHS claimed that information sharing was “essential.”

“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.

The Treasury Department has not yet responded to requests for comment.

The ongoing case over IRS and DHS data sharing is now set to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. DHS is actively appealing Kollar-Kotelly’s November order blocking the IRS from sharing data with DHS, which was signed last year by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS resigned after the deal was signed.

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