Christopher Bing:
The real number of people that have left as a result of this growing partnership with ICE is close to the hundreds, actually.
There’s been dozens of engineers that have left, lawyers, people in the privacy office. And many of them have left, in part, because they view this as unethical. But another part of this is that they actually see the legal risk in doing so. Taxpayer data is among the most protected and strictly regulated in the United States government, and disclosing it to an unauthorized party carries a felony of up to five years.
So there’s a lot of people who’ve left the agency, and that’s a little bit unique in the broader Trump administration in terms of the type of pushback that we’re seeing. And they’re getting closer to launching the system. It looks like it could launch by the end of July.
And so the IRS is unique in that, really, culturally, people are taught from day one that you have to be very careful with taxpayer information. And for them, for many of them, this whole effort kind of breaks that ethos.
