Fifty-two Internal Revenue Service employees made 86 suspicious accesses into the tax records of 30 different taxpayers between calendar years 2022 and 2025, a Treasury inspector general report found. The accessed files included those of United States government officials, business leaders, and entertainers.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration concluded the agency’s unauthorized-access program is failing to contain the risk. That finding lands amid long-running conservative concern that federal tax systems can be turned against political and cultural targets without real consequences for the people inside the agency.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported the TIGTA findings after the watchdog released its review. The tally covered activity as of November 2025. The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TIGTA’s report did not treat the lookups as routine work. It described improper use of official access to taxpayer accounts and said preventative controls, the discipline process, and victim-notification procedures all showed serious gaps.
The watchdog put the core problem in plain terms.
"The IRS’s UNAX [unauthorized access] program is not adequately addressing the risk of unauthorized access to taxpayers’ accounts,"
TIGTA also pointed to “deficiencies” in the “controls and/or processes intended to protect taxpayers and hold employees accountable for their actions.” In short, the systems meant to stop snooping and punish it were not doing either job well enough.
The 30 taxpayers were not named in the public account of the report. Investigators have not publicly released the identities of the 52 employees either. What the report did establish is the pattern: dozens of workers, dozens of sensitive files, and a multi-year window.
Accountability broke down after the accesses were found. TIGTA identified 22 employees who were not terminated even though they accessed taxpayer records “without the taxpayer’s consent or the IRS’s authorization.”
That figure is central for readers who expect a zero-tolerance culture around confidential return data. Tax information is among the most protected categories of federal records. When employees keep their jobs after unauthorized viewing, the deterrent signal collapses.
Other cases never reached a formal discipline proposal at all. Responsible employees “either resigned or retired before disciplinary action was proposed.” Those exits cut short the process that would normally decide penalties and trigger follow-up steps for affected taxpayers.
Notification failures compounded the access problem. The agency failed to notify 175 taxpayers that an unauthorized IRS employee had accessed their records because employees did not follow procedures. TIGTA’s account said the agency agreed those taxpayers should have been told.
Another 101 taxpayers were not notified because the employees involved resigned or retired before discipline was proposed. Taken together, the two categories show a large group of people whose private files were touched without the courtesy of official notice.
TIGTA recommended establishing overall timeliness standards for victim notifications. The IRS disagreed with that specific item. In its response, the agency said such standards were already established. That is the only open disagreement described in the available account of the exchange.
The inspector general issued eight recommendations. They included studying system improvements to reduce unauthorized-access cases, cutting the number of employees who can use certain command codes, and issuing guidance that stresses the legal weight of intentional unauthorized-access violations.
Acting IRS Chief Privacy Officer John Walker answered in a memo to the draft report. The agency agreed or partially agreed with seven of the recommendations. Walker’s response highlighted plans to implement corrective actions in December 2026.
December 2026 is not an immediate remedy. The suspicious accesses already stretched across 2022 through 2025. Taxpayers whose records were pulled during that span have already lived with whatever exposure those lookups created. Corrective plans scheduled for the end of next year do not rewind those events.
The new TIGTA findings sit against a recent history of high-profile tax-record abuse. In January 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison in a case involving the leak of President Donald Trump’s records to The New York Times and ProPublica. He had pleaded not guilty.
In January 2026, Trump and the Trump Organization filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Department of the Treasury. The suit alleged the IRS failed to protect them from the unauthorized inspection and leaking of confidential tax records in 2019 and that the failure caused reputational and financial harm.
In May 2026, the president voluntarily dropped that lawsuit in favor of forming an “anti-weaponization fund.” That fund was later killed. The civil case is closed, but the underlying worry about selective access and leaks never left the conservative legal debate.
Littlejohn was a contractor, not one of the 52 employees in the new report. The two matters are separate. Still, both involve the same core asset: tax data that federal law treats as confidential and that political actors, donors, executives, and public figures have special reason to guard.
Authorities have not publicly named the 30 taxpayers whose records were accessed. Investigators have not released a full public roster of the 52 employees or a complete breakdown of every disciplinary outcome beyond the 22 who were not fired.
The exact calendar date of the report’s “Tuesday” release was not fixed in absolute terms in the initial write-up, and the full text of every recommendation was not reproduced line by line. No public results have been released about whether any of the 86 accesses fed leaks, political research, or personal curiosity.
Investigators and IRS leadership will need to determine how command-code access is narrowed, how quickly victims are told, and whether resignation remains an off-ramp that ends accountability. Those are process questions with constitutional stakes. Confidential return information is not a browsing library for credentialed staff.
The agency’s partial agreements and its December 2026 corrective timeline now become the measurable test. Either the UNAX controls tighten in practice, or the inspector general’s warning stands as another paper finding without teeth.
When tax collectors can open files without consent and keep their jobs, ordinary citizens and public figures alike lose the boundary that makes voluntary compliance possible. Privacy rules that bind the public must bind the workforce that holds the keys.
