IRS officials have decided to conceal the home addresses of some 700,000 people suspected of being in the United States illegally, according to a report from the Washington Post.
The decision came on a request from immigration enforcement officials for those locations, and it was the IRS “rebuffing” attempts by the administration of President Donald Trump to gain access to that information for his crackdown on illegals.
The report noted that the Internal Revenue Service had promised “undocumented immigrants” over the years that it would protect their information and it would be safe for them to file income tax documents “without fear of being deported.”
And the IRS said the law doesn’t allow the release of personal information, even to another government agency.
AT the time, the IRS claimed, “There is no authorization under this provision to share tax data with ICE.”
The report said an estimated one-half of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country file income tax returns, filing with individual taxpayer numbers, or ITINs, as they are ineligible for Social Security numbers.
The report credited this population with paying billions of dollars in federal taxes.
The report said the Washington Post got access to a memo in which Department of Homeland Security officials asked the IRS to link the names with a last known address, phone number or email, and the request was a followup to a DHS request weeks ago that would let immigration officials turn over a list of names to the IRS in order to get home addresses.
The publication said five anonymous people familiar with the scenario made those claims.
Then this week a memo asked the IRS “to deploy dozens of highly skilled IRS auditors and criminal investigators to launch probes of businesses suspected of hiring immigrants not authorized to work in the United States,” the report said.
It said, “IRS investigations should be conducted, and assistance should be provided without regard for any threshold, floor, or internal policy for opening an investigation. Further, IRS should provide leads on businesses that are circumventing tax laws or violating worksite-related statutes, many of which are from prior leads or complaints that IRS did not investigate due to not meeting internal IRS policy for opening an investigation.”
While the IRS rejected the plan, the report said, the agency is trying to reach agreement on ways to help immigration officials without violating privacy laws.
The publication’s sources claimed the idea is triggering alarm inside the IRS because handing out taxpayer information to third parties in both a civil and criminal offense.
Dorothy A. Brown, of Georgetown University Law Center, claimed the program sounded like “racial profiling on steroids.”
And the report noted an anonymous federal official said ICE would be viewing IRS records as a way to locate illegal aliens through their address, workplaces, children and more.
The illegal aliens are, the IRS does confirm, “subject to U.S. taxes in spite of their illegal status.”
