Top Democrats question IRS on DOGE access to taxpayer data
Top Democrats in Congress want to know what Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to do at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after multiple outlets reported the advisory unit sought access to sensitive IRS systems.
Senate Finance Committee members Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to IRS acting Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell on Monday, requesting any agreements the IRS had signed with DOGE, information on whether DOGE has already been granted access to any IRS taxpayer information and a list of DOGE members who’ve been working on getting access to IRS information.
“Is the IRS considering giving DOGE team members access to [the IRS Integrated Data Retrieval System]? If so, why?” the senators wrote to O’Donnell.
The Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS) is a software program the IRS uses to get access to taxpayer accounts. It allows IRS employees to request tax returns, generate notices and enter transaction and collections data on a taxpayer’s file.
“Please provide a list of all DOGE team members currently employed at the IRS,” the Democratic senators wrote to O’Donnell.
The Hill has reached out to the IRS, the Treasury Department and the Ways and Means Committee for additional information on DOGE activities related to the IRS.
The Democrats' letter comes after DOGE had accessed sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department, leading attorneys general in Democratic states to get a restraining order put in place against the advisory unit.
A software engineer by the name of Gavin Kliger worked at IRS headquarters in Washington on Thursday as part of the DOGE effort, The New York Times reported on Monday.
A different DOGE engineer named Marko Elez who got access to federal payment systems maintained and operated by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service was granted read and write access to the systems before resigning from his position over racist social media posts he made that were uncovered by The Wall Street Journal.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that DOGE employees working on Treasury Department systems had no ability to rewrite sensitive code and that they had “read-only” access to the platforms.
“They are on read-only. They are looking. They can make no changes,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg News. Pressed on whether they had the ability to make changes, Bessent said “absolutely not.”
However, the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s deputy commissioner, Joseph Gioeli III, revealed last week that Elez did have the ability to make changes, having been “mistakenly” granted read and write access to a Treasury Department payment platform called the Secure Payment System (SPS).
“It was discovered that Mr. Elez’s database access to SPS on February 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only,” Gioeli said in a federal court document.
The IRS is in the middle of an operational overhaul, which Republicans tried to undo during the Biden administration, and it is likely to be further undermined over the course of the Trump administration. The agency was given an initial funding boost of $80 billion as part of Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, most of which was meant to go to an enforcement boost.
More than a quarter of that money was clawed back by Republicans during appropriations fights in the second half of the Biden administration. Almost all of the remaining money for additional audits, totaling $20.2 billion, was frozen last year due to an apparent oversight by Democrats and a stealth negotiating tactic executed by Republicans.
Top Democratic tax writer Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.) told The Hill in December that the frozen IRS funds were likely the result of “an error.”
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