The Taxpayer Inspector General reported Monday that the IRS provided addresses for nearly 47,000 people to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under a data-sharing agreement, but that the automated process used to match records was inconsistent and unreliable, and that ICE failed to meet safeguarding standards for receiving confidential taxpayer information.
The inspector general’s findings add to a growing record of legal and procedural problems surrounding the Trump administration’s use of IRS taxpayer data for immigration enforcement. A federal judge ruled in February that the IRS broke the law by disclosing taxpayer addresses to ICE, and the data-sharing arrangement is the subject of at least two active lawsuits.
“Our evaluation found that, before releasing address information on individual taxpayers, the IRS developed an automated process to match ICE data to IRS records,” the inspector general’s report reads. “However, the criteria were unable to identify and match the records accurately and consistently.”
ICE and the IRS entered the data-sharing agreement last year, with ICE requesting tax information and last known addresses for more than 1.2 million people. The IRS said in February that it improperly shared address data in “less than five percent” of the 47,000 addresses it shared with ICE.
“The IRS stated that it rejected records that did not meet certain conditions,” the report says. “However, the process implemented by the IRS failed to identify all records that should have been rejected.”
The inspector general also found that ICE did not meet the safeguarding standards required for receiving confidential taxpayer information. The report did not recommend any corrective action.
In November, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the IRS from sharing any further taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security. The court’s order remains in effect.