IRS failed to match taxpayer records with ICE data accurately, report finds

Source: Politico

06/08/2026 10:35 AM EDT


The IRS failed to consistently and accurately match taxpayer information with records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration accelerated its deportation efforts last summer, according to a government watchdog report released Monday.

The report from the Taxpayer Inspector General for Tax Administration is the first major examination of the Trump administration’s controversial effort to identify and deport undocumented immigrants using taxpayer information. It comes more than a year after ICE asked the IRS to share confidential information, including Taxpayer Identification Numbers and last known addresses, on more than 1.2 million people. The effort, which is the subject of ongoing litigation in multiple federal courts, yielded address matches for about 47,000 individuals.

The IRS admitted in February it improperly shared address data in “less than five percent” of those cases, after ICE submitted insufficient or incomplete information on a taxpayer. The inspector general’s report Monday found that the systems the IRS used to match ICE data “were unable to identify and match the records accurately and consistently.”

“The IRS stated that it rejected records that did not meet certain conditions,” the report reads. “However, the process implemented by the IRS failed to identify all records that should have been rejected.”. The report also found the IRS faced “challenges due to the lack of uniformity in the formatting of ICE data,” meaning the IRS could not match address data for individuals whose names contained minor variations between the agencies’ respective databases.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/08/irs-ice-improper-address-sharing-00953261