The ruling comes after an IRS official issued a sworn statement that tens of thousands of taxpayers’ data was shared.
A federal judge on Feb. 26 ruled that the IRS acted illegally by disclosing taxpayer information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the IRS erred when it shared the taxpayer information with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of an agreement between the two agencies in a bid to identify illegal immigrants.
Earlier in February, an IRS official, Dottie Romo, issued a sworn statement saying the IRS provided the information for about 47,000 taxpayers to DHS, which had requested the information of a total of 1.28 million people.
In Thursday’s 13-page opinion, Kollar-Kelly cited Romo’s statement as part of her ruling against the two agencies, calling it a “significant development” in the case.
The judge wrote that the IRS violated a confidentiality law “approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to ICE.”
The IRS had given “confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in response to requests from ICE that the IRS now admits were legally deficient. The Court’s prior decision to indicate that it would supplement the record on appeal with the Romo Declaration reflects the significance of this new information,” she wrote.
“In other words, the IRS not only failed to ensure that ICE’s request for confidential taxpayer address information met the statutory requirements, but this failure led the IRS to disclose confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE in situations where ICE’s request for that information was patently deficient.”
In a filing in mid-February, Romo wrote that the IRS had told DHS in January to take steps to “prevent the disclosure or dissemination, and to ensure appropriate disposal, of any data provided to ICE by IRS based on incomplete or insufficient address information” and that the agency also requested DHS’s assistance in moving to remediate the matter.
“DHS and ICE have confirmed to Treasury and IRS that they will comply with federal law and the MOU in addressing this data issue,” Romo added in the sworn statement, using an acronym for a memorandum of understanding between the two agencies.
The agencies have agreed they “will not inspect, view, use, copy, distribute, rely on, or otherwise act on any return information that has been obtained from or disclosed by IRS pursuant to the MOU.”
