WASHINGTON — An IRS employee who is affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency is expected to seek access to an IRS system that houses sensitive taxpayer information, according to an administration official.
The access would be to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, which allows IRS employees to access taxpayer accounts. An administration official originally said that the employee had been granted access but later clarified that the employee was expected to seek access and was not already in the system.
The IDRS allows employees to have “instantaneous visual access to certain taxpayer accounts,” according to the IRS website. The system can be used for “researching account information and requesting returns” and “automatically generating notices, collection documents and other outputs.”
It contains information such as taxpayers’ individual master files, taxpayer identification numbers, retirement account information and details on pending adoptions.
IDRS users “are authorized to access only those accounts required to accomplish their official duties,” according to the IRS website. They are not allowed to access the accounts of people with whom they have personal or financial interests, such as friends and relatives, according to an IRS document.
The DOGE-affiliated person in question is an IRS employee who started after President Donald Trump's second inauguration, the administration official confirmed to NBC News. The official said the employee was carrying out the "DOGE mission" and acting “legally and with the appropriate security clearances.”
"Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said when asked about the employee's potential access to the sensitive system. "It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.
"DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard-earned tax dollars on," Fields added.
The IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday evening.
The move, first reported by The Washington Post, is an expansion of DOGE's efforts to access sensitive information held by the federal government.
DOGE, headed by Elon Musk, has zeroed in on several government agencies and departments in an effort to cut what the administration paints as wasteful spending. DOGE has aimed to cut members of the federal workforce.
NBC News has reported that DOGE has accessed the Treasury Department’s payment system, which stores sensitive information like Social Security numbers. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also said this month that Trump authorized Musk to access FEMA disaster data.
The group has also taken aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
CORRECTION (Feb. 16, 2025, 10:59 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article cited an administration official incorrectly saying a DOGE-affiliated IRS employee accessed an internal system housing taxpayer information. That employee is expected to seek access to the system, the official said, but had not yet accessed it.
