The Internal Revenue Service provided the addresses of nearly 47,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a new report.
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TIGTA reported that the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered into a data-sharing memorandum of understanding with the Treasury Department on behalf of the IRS, signing the data-sharing agreement in April 2025. The agreement set requirements for ICE to submit valid requests for addresses of individuals subject to criminal investigation. However, IRS officials were reportedly concerned about the legality of developing and signing the data-sharing agreement.
"The IRS is required to ensure that returns and return information remain confidential and restricted from disclosure, unless specifically authorized under Internal Revenue Code § 6103," said the report. "Taxpayers have the right to expect that any information they provide to the IRS will not be disclosed unless authorized by the taxpayer or by law."
TIGTA found that, before releasing address information on individual taxpayers, the IRS developed an automated process to match ICE data with IRS records. However, the criteria it developed were unable to identify and match the records accurately and consistently. Last June, ICE requested address information on over 1.2 million records from the IRS. Of those, the IRS provided ICE with the last known address information of about 47,000 individuals. The IRS said it rejected records that didn't meet certain conditions, but the process implemented by the IRS failed to identify all the records that should have been rejected. Upon further review, the IRS estimated that less than 5% of the approximately 47,000 records it provided to ICE had potentially incomplete or insufficient address information.
In addition, the IRS ran into challenges because of the lack of uniformity in the formatting of the ICE data. The criteria created by the IRS used exact matching in some areas, and slight variations in the name and address fields led to the IRS not providing the current address information to ICE for cases that may have been a match.
TIGTA also found that ICE did not meet certain safeguarding standards before signing the data-sharing agreement. The IRS does a safeguard review of an agency receiving federal tax information to evaluate its compliance with the requirements. The IRS then issues a Safeguard Review Report with findings to the agency. But TIGTA's review of the report for ICE found that some of the findings for an unidentified agency in the partially reacted report remained open at the time of the data transfer.
TIGTA didn't make any recommendations in the report, and there was no response included from an IRS official. However, an influential Senate Democrat weighed in with a comment on the report. "ICE is a lawless organization that should never have come anywhere near taxpayer data," said Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, in a statement Monday. "It's clear that ICE was mishandling this data from the earliest days of Trump's second term, and 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."
