With the recent departure of Billy Long, we are headed toward our seventh commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, acting or otherwise, this year. This is a serious concern for a number of reasons, most obviously because it certainly can't help the quality of tax administration: To gather the revenue the country needs while also serving taxpayers successfully, the IRS needs consistency in leadership.
But for the moment, I'm concerned with one of the less obvious reasons that the Trump administration has burned through so many people in that position. It has been reported that Long was ousted because he was reluctant to share more private data about taxpayers with the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency than they were already getting. They had access to that original data because of a deal made earlier this year that was reportedly at least part of the reason Acting Commissioner Melanie Knauss resigned in April — along with the agency's acting CFO, its chief of staff, its acting chief risk officer, and its chief privacy officer.
Homeland Security and ICE want that data to help them identify people who are here in the country illegally. There isn't space or time enough here to debate that goal or their methods, but it seems clear that there can and must be limits to the information that the IRS shares with the rest of the federal government — and the short version of those limits should be that if the information is sought for something other than tax collection or administration, it shouldn't be shared outside the IRS.
"By providing your personal information, you give us consent to use the information only for the purpose for which it was collected," the IRS says on its website, and that should be taken seriously.
Some will suggest that this is asking the government to act with one hand tied behind its back — and they would be right. The federal government has enormous power, and there need to be multiple safeguards around that power, to make sure, for instance, that presidents and prosecutors don't use our personal tax information to persecute us, or that regulators don't use a business's tax filings to coerce them into serving an administration's policies.
We need the government to restrain itself, and to use the information we provide only for the purposes for which we give it. The importance of this principle to a voluntary tax system should be obvious, as should its importance to protecting a free citizenry. To borrow a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing."
If the revolving door at the top of the IRS is due to the administration seeking candidates who are willing to share private information with the left hand of government, then it needs to stop.
