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Judge rules #IRS broke #law ‘approximately 42,695 times’ in giving #DHS data
A court on Thursday issued an opinion on a data-sharing agreement between the taxpayer agency & federal #immigration authorities.
#Trump #law #privacy #InfoSec #WhiteSupremacy #WhiteChristianNationalism
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/26/irs-data-federal-judge-dhs-illegal/
A federal judge has found that the #IRS violated federal law “approximately 42,695 times” when it shared confidential taxpayer addresses with #immigration enforcement officials last summer.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the ruling Thursday as part of ongoing litigation over a data-sharing arrangement between the IRS & the #DHS.
#Trump #law #privacy #InfoSec #WhiteSupremacy #WhiteChristianNationalism
Federal #law requires that before the #IRS hands over a taxpayer’s address, a requesting agency must first provide the IRS with the name & address of the person it’s looking for. The requirement exists to ensure that the government can access confidential tax records only for individuals it has already specifically identified.
#Trump #immigration #privacy #InfoSec #WhiteSupremacy #WhiteChristianNationalism
The ruling finds that #DHS did not follow this #law. The judge wrote that the vast majority of the nearly 47,300 taxpayer addresses the #IRS shared with #ICE in August were disclosed without the IRS confirming that ICE provided a valid address for the person whose records it was seeking.
#Trump #immigration #privacy #InfoSec #WhiteSupremacy #WhiteChristianNationalism
“The #IRS violated the [ #IRC] 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],’” the judge’s opinion stated.
The case is now before the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, where the government is appealing Kollar-Kotelly’s November order that blocked the data-sharing arrangement.
WaPo reported that the #IRS had improperly shared #confidential #tax information of thousands of individuals with #immigration enforcement officials. That report was confirmed by a subsequent court filing by Dottie A. Romo, the IRS’s chief risk & control officer.
#DHS officials have defended the data-sharing agreement as necessary to crack down on illegal #immigration. [but you can’t break a law because you think another law was broken.]
