It’s being reported that IRS Commissioner Billy Long was forced out yesterday after the agency clashed with White House and DHS officials over access to data on illegal aliens. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was put in Long’s place until a permanent nominee can be chosen and confirmed by the Senate.
The Washington Post isn’t reporting that this is why Long was fired, but it does suggest this may have been a contributing factor.
The White House pushed back on the reporting, saying everyone has been in lock step the entire time and any reporting to the contrary is absurd.
Here’s more on the reporting:
The Internal Revenue Service clashed with the White House over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants hours before Trump administration officials forced IRS Commissioner Billy Long from his post Friday, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The Department of Homeland Security sent the IRS a list Thursday of 40,000 names of people DHS officials thought were in the country illegally and asked the IRS to use confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The Treasury Department, the parent agency of the IRS, and DHS agreed to an arrangement in April to facilitate such data sharing — over the objections of the tax service’s privacy lawyers.
On Friday, though, the IRS responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3 percent of the names immigration enforcement officials submitted, the people said.
The names the agency could match were mainly the individuals for whom DHS provided an individual taxpayer identification number. An ITIN is an IRS-specific ID that immigrants often use in place of a Social Security number on a tax filing. Undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year, which the ITINs help facilitate.
White House officials requested additional information on the taxpayers the IRS identified, the people said — specifically, if any of them had claimed the earned income tax credit, which can reduce the tax bill for some low-income filers. The IRS declined to provide that information, citing taxpayer privacy rights.
Long had previously told agency executives that his agency would not furnish confidential taxpayer information outside of the confines of the IRS’s agreement with DHS, the people said.
Still, the people did not know if tension over the IRS’s role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive contributed to Long’s departure from the IRS.
“The Trump administration is working in lockstep to eliminate information silos and to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of benefits meant for hardworking American taxpayers,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
“Any absurd assertion other than everyone being aligned on the mission is simply false and totally fake news,” she added after this story was published.
DHS said in a statement that the agreement with the IRS “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected, while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”