In court filings on February 11, 2026, the IRS revealed additional details about its response to a June 2025 ICE request for 1.3 million taxpayers’ last known addresses—data that the Code expressly protects as part of “taxpayer identity.” Under the terms of an April 2025 information-sharing agreement, the IRS provided this information to ICE for 47,000 individuals.
The principal revelation from last week: a small but material percentage of ICE’s requests were fulfilled by the IRS in error—the information requests from ICE were incomplete. This inadvertent disclosure may have violated both the terms of the ICE-IRS information-sharing agreement and the statutory confidentiality rules in § 6103. Plaintiffs challenging this information-sharing agreement are seeking additional discovery after this revelation.
Details and commentary, below the fold.
The IRS estimates that “less than five percent” of its August 2025 disclosures to ICE—approximately 2,300—were made in response to incomplete requests by ICE. Essentially, the IRS processed ICE’s information requests through a matching script, and this software did not adequately validate whether a mandatory “address” field was sufficiently populated. These erroneous disclosures are distinct from—and in addition to—the core legal dispute over whether the ICE-IRS information-sharing agreement itself fits within § 6103’s disclosure exceptions.
One clear risk of these inadvertent disclosures is misidentification: the IRS may have disclosed the wrong person’s last known address to ICE, and ICE may attempt to enforce removal orders on the wrong individual. In court filings, ICE has represented that it has not used taxpayer data to deport individuals—and, in fact, simply holds the as-yet unutilized taxpayer data on a single government-issued computer. Two preliminary injunctions currently block ICE from receiving or using this taxpayer data.
The IRS and Department of Homeland Security are taking steps to identify and remediate the inappropriate data disclosures—though the IRS has not yet stated whether it will notify the taxpayers affected. Democrats in the House and Senate have called for an investigation into these erroneous disclosures. And there are obvious parallels with President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over disclosures of his tax information by an IRS contractor.
Overall, the IRS’s court filings reflect candor to the tribunal—and underscore the ongoing existence of control and compliance concerns inside the IRS. In the three pending cases challenging the ICE-IRS information-sharing agreement, these disclosure errors may strengthen plaintiffs’ calls for relief and complicate the government’s defense. The bigger question: will this controversy over interagency data sharing—a clear deterrent to voluntary compliance—show up in federal receipts this filing season?
Related TaxProf Blog coverage:
- Trump IRS Lawsuit Puts Him on Both Sides of the Case (Feb. 3, 2026)
- ICE and the IRS: Preliminary Injunction and Other Updates (Nov. 22, 2025)
- ProPublica: The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Taxpayer Data with ICE (July 17, 2025)
- IRS Nears Deal to Give ICE Addresses of Immigrants Targeted for Deportation (Mar. 25, 2025)
- Tax Professors Urge President Biden to Commute 5-Year Prison Sentence Received by IRS Contractor Who Leaked President Trump’s Tax Returns (Dec. 18, 2024)
- NY Times: Former Contractor Who Leaked Trump’s Tax Returns Sentenced To 5 Years In Prison (Jan. 31, 2024)
Other related materials:
- Erin Schilling & Erin Slowey, IRS Improperly Shares Immigrants’ Data with ICE: Explained, Bloomberg Law (Feb. 12, 2026)
- Memorandum & Order, Comm. Econ. Dev. Ctr. Se. Mass. v. Bessent, No. 1:25-cv-12822-IT (D. Mass., Feb. 5, 2026)
