Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote a letter to the acting Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration seeking an investigation into reports that the Trump administration is providing sensitive taxpayer data to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and people affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Senator Cortez Masto has repeatedly raised the alarm about the IRS’s cruel and illegal plans to share taxpayer information with DHS.
“Taxpayer data held by the IRS is, by design, subject to some of the strongest privacy protections under federal law, the violation of which can trigger civil and criminal sanctions, including up to five years in prison,” wrote the senators. “Congress passed these protections in the 1970s after President Nixon weaponized the IRS against his political enemies. These legal protections for taxpayer data apply to all taxpayers and are an essential foundation for our tax system, which requires the voluntary submission of information to the government. Voluntary tax compliance depends on taxpayers having faith that their confidential information will not be used for anything other than tax administration.”
“Immediately following Bessent’s execution of the [agreement with DHS], several IRS leaders announced their resignations, including Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause and Chief Privacy Officer Kathleen Walters, raising further questions about whether they resigned to avoid being a party to a criminal conspiracy to violate tax privacy law,” they continued.
“The risks created by these activities cannot be overstated. [… IRS] data can be inaccurate because of identity theft, keypunch errors, obsolete address information, and a wide range of other reasons,” they asserted. “If DHS relies on the same data to deport millions of people without validating its accuracy, it is likely to end up making grave errors that impact American citizens and immigrants with valid legal status.”
The full text of the letter can be found here.
Senator Cortez Masto has pushed multiple Departments under the Trump Administration for detailed, public information regarding the impacts of President Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic actions on Nevada – including at the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, and General Services Administration.
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