Irs Failed To Match Taxpayer Records With Ice Data Accurately, Report Finds

The IRS failed to consistently and accurately match taxpayer information with records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration accelerated its deportation efforts last summer, according to a government watchdog report released Monday.

The report from the Taxpayer Inspector General for Tax Administration is the first major examination of the Trump administration’s controversial effort to identify and deport undocumented immigrants using taxpayer information. It comes more than a year after ICE asked the IRS to share confidential information, including Taxpayer Identification Numbers and last known addresses, on more than 1.2 million people. The effort, which is the subject of ongoing litigation in multiple federal courts, yielded address matches for about 47,000 individuals.

The IRS admitted in February it improperly shared address data in “less than five percent” of those cases, after ICE submitted insufficient or incomplete information on a taxpayer.

The inspector general’s report Monday found that the systems the IRS used to match ICE data “were unable to identify and match the records accurately and consistently.”

“The IRS stated that it rejected records that did not meet certain conditions,” the report reads. “However, the process implemented by the IRS failed to identify all records that should have been rejected.”

The report also found the IRS faced “challenges due to the lack of uniformity in the formatting of ICE data,” meaning the IRS could not match address data for individuals whose names contained minor variations between the agencies’ respective databases.

TIGTA also found ICE did not meet IRS’ standards for safeguarding data before the agencies entered the agreement. The IRS reviewed ICE’s compliance with the tax agency’s data safeguarding standards and found several issues that “remained open at the time of the data transfer,” though it’s unclear what these issues were because parts of the inspector general report are redacted.

Unlike most of its investigations, TIGTA did not include any recommendations for the IRS in Monday’s report. It plans to share its concerns with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.

IRS and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

Nina Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, said the report reaffirmed what a federal judge found in her group’s lawsuit against the IRS for its data-sharing arrangement with ICE.

“What comes out in the report is that TIGTA had already raised concerns about the way ICE was handling the data it received,” even under taxpayer privacy laws that require a federal judge to approve the IRS sharing taxpayer data with another federal agency, she said in an emailed statement. Olson added that “the IRS itself had failed to ensure corrective actions were being undertaken."

Josh Rosenthal, the workers’ rights program director at the Asian Law Caucus, which is representing immigrant advocacy groups in a separate lawsuit against the IRS and the Social Security Administration for data-sharing deals with ICE, said the findings in the report added further justification for a federal judge’s injunction on the administration’s efforts earlier this year.

“Until this report, we didn’t have the details of the formal safeguarding that ICE had or hadn’t adopted,” Rosenthal said. “What we see here is that this is a longstanding and apparent problem with the ICE privacy protections for tax data.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Finance Committee, said the report shows that ICE mishandled taxpayer data “from the earliest days of Trump’s second term.”

“ICE is a lawless organization that should never have come anywhere near taxpayer data,” Wyden said in a statement. “The data sharing agreement between IRS and DHS was designed to paper over widespread violations of strict taxpayer privacy laws. Those responsible for violating the law should face prosecution.”

Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) was not immediately available for comment.