Senators demand answers from Treasury on IRS’s data-sharing deal with ICE

The Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat is demanding answers from the Treasury Department about the IRS’s data-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the agency “refused” to respond to questions about the pact.

In a letter sent Friday to Treasury Secretary and acting IRS Commissioner Scott Bessent, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and 10 of his colleagues blasted the tax agency’s “unprecedented and disturbing disclosure of federal tax return information” to the Department of Homeland Security under an April 2025 memorandum of understanding. 

That MOU led to the resignation of the IRS’s then-acting commissioner and sparked legal challenges about the agency’s compliance with data privacy law spelled out in federal tax code. 

“The IRS and Treasury Department have refused to answer key questions about the agreement it reached with ICE in 2025 to share legally-protected taxpayer data,” Senate Finance Committee Democrats said in a press release. 

“The privacy protections that safeguard taxpayer data are among the most stringent in federal law, and they carry tough criminal and civil penalties for federal officials who violate them,” the statement continued. “A recent exodus of nonpartisan IRS leadership and compliance staff suggests that there are concerns within the agency that the administration is violating the law.”

Court filings released last October revealed that ICE requested nearly 1.3 million taxpayer records, which led to more than 47,000 matches. Less than a month later, a federal judge blocked the IRS from sharing taxpayer addresses with ICE.

The lawmakers cited that ruling — which found that sharing taxpayer addresses violated the Administrative Procedure Act on how agencies propose and enact regulations — and objections from former senior IRS officials about the enforcement of “confidentiality protections.” 

“These officials have described internal objections, unresolved legal concerns, and pressure to proceed notwithstanding those concerns,” the lawmakers wrote. “Such statements, made by officials with direct responsibility for taxpayer privacy and disclosure compliance, raise serious questions about whether Treasury and IRS leadership knowingly proceeded after being advised that the disclosures were likely illegal.”

The letter connects those disclosures and Treasury’s “refusal to answer basic questions about this scheme” with the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement operations across the country.

“Any administration official helping [President Donald] Trump, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem violate taxpayer privacy laws ought to face prosecution, and anybody who’s counting on a Trump pardon to keep them out of prison ought to remember that they’re also risking civil penalties he can’t erase,” the letter states.

Wyden and his colleagues closed the letter by asking Bessent for responses by Feb. 16 to a series of questions about the IRS-ICE data-sharing deal. 

Those questions include: details on each ICE request dating back to the execution of the MOU; how the IRS determined that the requests complied with Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code; how many ICE employees were “personally and directly engaged” with the effort; which IRS officials were responsible for approvals; what technical and policy controls were adopted to prevent access to unrelated DHS personnel; disclosure of any White House requests to expand the MOU; and whether Treasury or the IRS “is continuing or pausing disclosures under the MOU and whether any previously disclosed datasets … have been retrieved, segregated, or destroyed.”

Wyden was joined in the letter by Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, Alex Padilla of California, and Peter Welch of Vermont, and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine.