Historically Reluctant to Share Taxpayer Data, IRS Will Cooperate With ICE

The Internal Revenue Service reached an agreement with immigration authorities on Monday to share the tax information of immigrants without legal status as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

That marks a contrast with previous IRS policy on sharing taxpayer data with other agencies—namely, the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration.

When EBSA attempted to work with the IRS in 2023 to create a Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database, the IRS took the position it did not have the “legal authority” to share Form 8955-SSA data with the DOL for purposes of contacting retirement plan participants, due to confidentiality provisions in the Internal Revenue Code.

As a result, the Department of Labor asked plan administrators to provide contact information directly to the DOL voluntarily.

The database officially launched on December 27, 2024, two years after the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 passed, which directed EBSA to create such a database to help workers and beneficiaries search for retirement plans that may still owe them benefits.

It is unclear if this week’s agreement between the Department of the Treasury, which houses the IRS, and the Department of Homeland Security makes it any more likely that the IRS would reconsider sharing data with EBSA.

According to the memorandum of understanding between the IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agreement signed by the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of homeland security, ICE officials would be able to ask the IRS for information about immigrants who have final orders of removal or are under criminal investigation.

Lisa Gomez, the most recent head of EBSA as the former assistant secretary of labor under former President Joe Biden, says the IRS/DHS memorandum of understanding is under the same general provision of the Internal Revenue Code, 6103, that EBSA had attempted to use with the lost and found database. The code provision deals with information sharing and the IRS’ ability to disclose taxpayer information.

Michael Kreps, a principal in Groom Law Group, said, “the IRS is subject to a number of laws that protect taxpayer information. They do have the ability to share that information with other agencies in some cases and under some circumstances. But there are legitimate policy reasons behind a policy of not using taxpayer information for immigration enforcement.”

EBSA had been mandated by SECURE 2.0 to obtain taxpayer information from the IRS, but there is no legislative directive associated with ICE obtaining this data.

Gomez says at the time, it was frustrating that the IRS would not cooperate, especially because EBSA was required by Congress to complete the database.

“While we completely understood and respected that the other agencies needed to be doing their part as far as making sure that they’re not disclosing this highly sensitive information … it was certainly frustrating for us from EBSA’s point of view, because we needed to get this database up and going,” Gomez says.

Gomez says the IRS sharing taxpayer information with ICE is particularly concerning because the acting commissioner of the IRS, Melanie Krause, resigned as a result of the agreement between the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Homeland Security. Krause had served as acting head of the IRS since February. The agency’s chief privacy officer, chief financial officer and chief risk officer are also resigning, according to Reuters.

“If people internally are voicing by leaving that they clearly don’t agree with this … it’s surprising and incredibly concerning,” Gomez says.

Kathleen Evey Walters, chief privacy officer for the IRS prior to her reported resignation, said in a declaration on Monday that neither DHS nor ICE have so far requested information of taxpayers under the new agreement.

The Bipartisan Policy Center reported that in 2022, unauthorized immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, typically by working under borrowed or fraudulent Social Security numbers.

If immigrants fear that filing taxes or paying into Social Security could expose them to deportation, many may choose not to file or contribute. Gomez says this could impact Social Security’s funding level.

When building the Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database, EBSA had asked retirement plan administrators covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to submit, or to authorize their plans’ recordkeepers or third-party administrators to submit, certain data to populate the database.

A spokesperson from the DOL did not immediately respond to a request for a status update on how much of the database has been populated since launch.