IRS employees are increasingly poking into taxpayers’ secret information — a violation of the law — but prosecutors are refusing to go after them, the agency’s inspector general said in a new report.
Investigators at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration say they uncovered and referred to the Justice Department 648 cases of unauthorized attempts to access taxpayer data by IRS employees from 2018 through the middle of last year.
Federal prosecutors refused to bring charges in all but six of the cases.
That works out to less than 1%.
The inspector general said in the report Friday that prosecutors offered myriad reasons for not bringing charges, including why someone poked into the information, how big the breach was and whether they disclosed the information they purloined.
The breaches are known within the IRS as UNAX cases, short for Unauthorized Access, Attempted Access, or Inspection of Taxpayer Records.
The IRS takes it seriously enough that it has a program designed to sniff out UNAX cases and turn them over to the inspector general, who then investigates and refers substantiated cases to prosecutors for final action.
“According to the IRS, the UNAX program is designed to ensure that willful unauthorized access or inspection of taxpayer records is a crime punishable upon conviction by fines, imprisonment and termination of employment,” the inspector general said.
The number of cases of unauthorized access rose from 115 in 2020 to 121 in 2021, 123 in 2022 and 125 through July of 2023.
There were also 46 cases of disclosure of taxpayer information in 2023, as of mid-July.
The inspector general says nearly 40% of those cases don’t rise to the level of referrals to prosecutors either because the allegation was disproved or deemed inadvertent.
The other cases were substantiated and willful but prosecutors still refused almost all of them.
The Washington Times sought comment from the Justice Department for this story.
The inspector general said 91,356 IRS employees and contractors had access to secret taxpayer data as of July 2023.
So did nearly 300 employees who were already “separated” from the agency, investigators said.
The IRS also found 19 contractors who had access despite unfavorable background check results.
They have since had their access revoked.
Access issues have come under scrutiny after a contractor managed to steal the tax data of then-President Donald Trump and hundreds of the country’s wealthiest taxpayers. Charles Littlejohn is serving a five-year prison sentence for stealing and leaking those sets of data to news outlets.
He figured out that while the IRS blocked data downloads to major file-sharing sites, users could create their own websites and download data to them. Using creative searches he managed to zero in on Mr. Trump’s tax data inside IRS systems, then sent the information to his own website.
IRS officials say they’ve since made big strides in cleaning up access.
The agency is adding sensitivity labels to types of data to control access and now has better methods to audit how its systems are being used by employees and contractors.
It has also made it much tougher to download data to a thumb drive or email it outside the agency.
