Court papers filed on Monday confirmed the agencies signed a memorandum of understanding.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reached an agreement to share data on taxpayers to target illegal immigration, according to a Monday court filing.
In the new court documents, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers arguing on behalf of the Treasury Department said that a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that was “signed by the Department of the Treasury and DHS reiterates the agencies’ commitment to sharing information only in the way” that the law “permits and includes clear guardrails to ensure compliance.”
“As laid out in the MOU, DHS can legally request return information relating to individuals under criminal investigation, and the IRS must provide it,” added the court filing, which was submitted in response to a lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups that sought to prevent the MOU from going into effect.
For years, the IRS, overseen by the Treasury Department, has allowed illegal immigrants to file income tax returns using individual tax identification numbers. A think tank, the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center, says that unauthorized immigrants have contributed $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, usually by using borrowed or fraudulent Social Security numbers.
The IRS, the court papers also said, “will only disclose the return information to DHS” or to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if certain requirements are met.
“DHS and ICE must safeguard any return information disclosed by the IRS” in compliance with federal law, government lawyers wrote.
Between March 17 and April 7, the IRS hasn’t received “any requests for taxpayer information from DHS or ICE and has not provided any return information to DHS or ICE,” according to the filing.
A spokesperson for DHS confirmed the memorandum to The Epoch Times in a statement on Tuesday that the agreement between the two agencies allows them to be doing “what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government to solve problems.”
“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, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at the American taxpayer expense,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the Treasury Department said in a statement to news outlets Tuesday that the MOU was signed under “longstanding authorities granted by Congress, which serve to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans while streamlining the ability to pursue criminals.”
