By Brian Schwartz

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is seeking access to data systems within the Internal Revenue Service that house personal taxpayer information, according to people familiar with the matter.

An agreement with the IRS could give the team access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System, these people explained. That system, according to the IRS, allows anyone with access the ability "to have instantaneous visual access to certain taxpayer accounts."

DOGE is operating as a unit within the new administration, which President Trump has tasked with cutting spending and regulations.

Those with knowledge of DOGE's attempt to access IRS records said that, as of Monday morning, access had yet to be given, but one of the people noted that it was being considered by some in the agency as an urgent goal by the DOGE team.

Trump's nominee to lead the IRS, former Republican congressman Billy Long, hasn't yet been confirmed by the Senate. The agency is currently being led by Douglas O'Donnell, who has spent roughly 40 years at the IRS.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in an interview last week that he had three goals for the IRS, "collections, privacy and customer service" and said the administration was "going to do a big IT upgrade."

The IRS has an extraordinary amount of taxpayer information, both for households and businesses. For example, the agency has said that taxpayers filed 213.3 million returns and other forms electronically with the agency in 2023.

If Musk's team were to gain access to the IRS's systems, it could allow them to view a variety of sensitive data. Files in the Integrated Data Retrieval System, for instance, reveal individual taxpayer identification numbers and tax preparers' identification numbers.

The move by DOGE to gain access to the IRS's systems comes after a DOGE team arrived at the agency's headquarters last week. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is expected to attempt to lay off thousands of IRS employees in the coming days, according to people briefed on the plans. DOGE's attempt to access the taxpayer systems was earlier reported by the Washington Post.

White House spokesman Harrison Fields said that "Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long. It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it."

He added that "DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard earned tax dollars on."

Tax fraud is a longstanding issue that the IRS has worked to battle. The agency has said that its criminal division initiated more than 2,667 investigations and secured 1,571 convictions in the fiscal year that ended at the end of September. The agency has also warned that a contentious tax credit created during the coronavirus outbreak, known as the employee-retention tax credit, was subject to fraud.

DOGE officials have already spent weeks working inside other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, Education Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Agency for International Development. The Trump administration has attempted to initiate widespread spending cuts to many of those agencies.

But not all of it has gone according to plan. Musk's team initially gained access to the Treasury's payment systems but that has since been halted by a judge. A federal judge also halted the administration's attempts to make further cuts to the CFPB and other efforts that could dismantle the agency.

Some Democrats have warned for more than a week about risks to taxpayers if DOGE is allowed to access sensitive taxpayer information without legal guardrails. So far, there is no evidence that records accessed by Musk's teams have been leaked.

Write to Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 17, 2025 11:26 ET (16:26 GMT)

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