Politics

Dozens Of IRS Employees Snooped Through Celebrities, Other High-Profile Taxpayers’ Private Records, IG Report Finds

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A recent internal investigation concluded that some Internal Revenue Service employees improperly used their official access to snoop through the tax records of public figures.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s (TIGTA) office identified 86 “suspicious accesses” into the records of 30 different taxpayers by 52 individuals employed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from calendar years 2022 to 2025 as of November 2025, according to a TIGTA report released Tuesday. The report noted the improperly accessed taxpayer records included those belonging to “United States government officials, business leaders, and entertainers.”

The IRS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“The IRS’s UNAX [unauthorized access] program is not adequately addressing the risk of unauthorized access to taxpayers’ accounts,” the report states. It went on to identify preventative controls, the IRS’s discipline process, and victim notification procedures as being compromised by “deficiencies” in the “controls and/or processes intended to protect taxpayers and hold employees accountable for their actions.”

The report further states the TIGTA “identified 22 employees who were not terminated” despite accessing taxpayer records “without the taxpayer’s consent or the IRS’s authorization.”

The TIGTA also determined that the IRS did not always notify the taxpayers impacted by UNAX in a timely manner. The agency “failed to notify 175 taxpayers that their records were accessed by an unauthorized IRS employee because employees did not follow procedures” but agreed they should have been notified.

An additional 101 taxpayers, however, were not notified of their involvement in UNAX situations because the IRS employees responsible for them “either resigned or retired before disciplinary action was proposed.”

The TIGTA’s report recommended eight solutions to the IRS in light of its findings. They include studying system improvements to reduce cases of UNAX, reducing the number of employees who have access to certain command codes, and issuing guidance emphasizing the legal weight of intentional UNAX violations.

Acting IRS Chief Privacy Officer John Walker wrote a memo in response to an issued draft of TIGTA’s report in which the agency “agreed” or “partially agreed” with seven of the recommendations. The acknowledgement by IRS leadership also highlighted plans to implement corrective actions in December 2026.

The recommendation the IRS disagreed with, however, was to “establish overall timeliness standards regarding victim notifications to impacted taxpayers” because the agency believed such standards were already established.

The report follows President Donald Trump voluntarily dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Department of the Treasury in May 2026 in favor of forming the subsequently killed “anti-weaponization fund.” In the January lawsuit, Trump and the Trump Organization alleged the IRS failed to protect them from the unauthorized inspection and leaking of confidential tax records in 2019, causing reputational and financial harm.

Former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2024 after pleading “not guilty” to leaking Trump’s records to The New York Times and ProPublica.