The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has pressed the IRS for permission to access individual tax return information of US households and businesses. While the DOGE team says it needs taxpayer data to search out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” such a move puts at risk deeply personal information on more than 150 million tax filers, with no clear benefit.
DOGE staffers already accessed filers’ tax refund information through the database of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, the office that processes nearly all federal government payments. For example, that database includes the bank account information of every filer who received an electronic tax refund.
A federal judge has since temporarily curbed DOGE’s access to the Fiscal Service data.
Another Level
But accessing individual tax returns takes DOGE’s information-seeking to another level. It wants to be able to tap into the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS). Anyone with this access could enter a taxpayer’s name and Social Security number and learn their income, address, banking and brokerage account numbers, marital status, whether they had significant medical expenses, and the name of their employer and tax preparer. They could find out if a taxpayer has been audited. Without guardrails, they could retrieve all this information from nearly every household and business in the US.
Think of IDRS as the key to the IRS data vault. It is, says former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, “the motherlode. It contains everything.” Olson’s current organization, the Center for Taxpayer Rights, has joined a lawsuit to block DOGE access to the IDRS.
Highly Sensitive
DOGE access to IDRS carries significant risks. It could be used for political purposes. Or, without proper security in place, IRS data accessed by DOGE could be hacked by identify thieves or foreign governments. DOGE has provided no public information about how it plans to protect the sensitive data it collects.
IRS databases are so closely-held that access to IDRS is limited even for agency employees, who normally can view them only for their own specifically assigned cases. Under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer data is a felony. Just last year, an agency contractor was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking information on high-income taxpayers to a news organization.
What Is The Goal?
Trump Administration officials have conflicting explanations for why they want access to the IRS data retrieval system.
In an interview with Fox News, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller insisted DOGE was seeking data only at the “programmatic level” but also said access to the agency database would be used to root out abuse by “foreign fraud rings,” and parents who fraudulently claim the Child Tax Credit.
The problem: It is unclear how specific cases of fraud, or even errors, could be identified without an audit of individual returns.
For example, a return might show a taxpayer claimed a certain deduction. Without an audit, DOGE could not know if the deduction was proper. And even an improper deduction may not be fraud, which requires intent—something that could only be learned after an in-depth investigation.
Yet, the Trump Administration is expected to fire many of the IRS staffers who perform audits and a Trump executive order bars the agency indefinitely from hiring replacements.
Systems Modernization
Miller also said the DOGE effort was intended to help modernize the IRS data systems, a goal widely shared by both Democrats and Republicans.
But it is hard to see how DOGE’s access to IDRS could help the agency run more efficiently. Users generally access only one return at a time, which is no way to analyze processes. In addition, Olson notes that there is no need to use real taxpayer information to upgrade systems. That normally is done with simulated or anonymous data until the final testing of a new program.
DOGE’s use of IDRS to access IRS data is different from the way researchers use return information to help improve tax administration.
For example, IRS and Treasury analysts have used tax compliance data to help identify the causes of erroneous claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit. But this kind of thorough tax return analysis is hard, time-consuming, and requires detailed knowledge of both the law and household income dynamics. And outside researchers are subject to extremely strict rules about how they can use the data and who can see it.
It remains unclear how much authority DOGE will have to access taxpayer data and how it intends to use the information. But there are significant risks to taxpayers and no evidence that the DOGE initiative will benefit IRS operations.
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