CDT Stands Up for Taxpayer Privacy

The Center for Democracy & Technology has joined over 270 other organizations in a letter calling on Congress to stand up for taxpayer privacy just as millions of Americans are filing their tax returns. The letter decries a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) pursuant to which the Internal Revenue Service will share with the Department of Homeland Security taxpayer information regarding as many as seven million taxpayers that DHS suspects are undocumented. Taxpayers will have no prior notice that their information is being shared, and no opportunity to challenge the sharing of their information on a case-by-case basis before it is shared.

As stated in the letter, which was quarterbacked by the civil rights and advocacy NGO UnidosUS, the IRS-DHS MOU “… poses an unprecedented threat to taxpayer privacy protections that have been respected on a bipartisan basis for nearly 50 years.” Taxpayer information is protected by law against disclosure, and immigration enforcement is not a recognized exception to those protections.  We are calling for Congress to conduct oversight hearings, demand release of the MOU without redactions, and demand that the Treasury Department explain its novel interpretation of the law. 

Taxpayer privacy encourages taxpayer compliance. As CDT has pointed out, use of taxpayer information for immigration enforcement will create a huge disincentive for undocumented people to pay taxes, and will drive them further into the informal labor sector, where they are vulnerable to abuse. This will cost the Treasury billions in lost tax revenue. The IRS had urged undocumented people to file tax returns, and to encourage them to do so, gave assurances that information submitted for tax purposes would not be used for immigration enforcement. The IRS has reneged on those assurances, calling into question other taxpayer privacy commitments — including those imposed by law. 

Read the full letter.