DOGE employee was supposed to try to get into the IRS system that holds private information about taxpayers

The Integrated Data Retrieval System lets people who work for the IRS get information about taxpayers.

An source in the administration says that an IRS worker who works for the Department of Government Efficiency is likely to try to get into a system that holds private information about taxpayers.

The Integrated Data Retrieval System would be used to get in. This system lets IRS workers get into taxpayer accounts. At first, someone from the administration said that the employee had been given access. Later, they said that the employee needed to ask for access and wasn’t already in the system.

Workers can access taxpayer accounts through the IDRS, which allows them to research information, request returns, and generate notices, collection documents, and other outputs.

It has things like taxpayers’ individual master files, taxpayer identification numbers, information about retirement accounts, and information about adoptions that are still in the works.

The IRS website says that IDRS users “are authorised to access only those accounts required to carry out their official duties.” According to an IRS document, they can’t get into the accounts of people with whom they have personal or financial ties, like family and friends.

The person with ties to DOGE in question works for the IRS and started after President Trump’s second inauguration, an administration source told NBC News. The official said that the worker was doing the “DOGE mission” and was “acting legally and with the right security clearances.”

“Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply ingrained in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a spokesman for the White House, said when asked about the employee’s possible access to the private system. “You need to be able to get into the system directly to find and fix the problem.”

DOGE, led by Elon Musk, plans to expose fraud and reveal government spending, aiming to cut wasteful spending, despite IRS response being delayed. DOGE wants to get rid of people who work for the federal government.

NBC News said that DOGE got into the payment system used by the Treasury Department to store private data like Social Security numbers. This month, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, also said that Trump gave Musk permission to look at FEMA crisis data.

Along with the CFPB and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the group has also gone after those two.

FIXED (Feb. 16, 2025, 10:59 p.m. ET): In an earlier version of this story, an administration official was quoted wrongly as saying that an IRS worker connected to DOGE got into an internal system that stored information about taxpayers. The official said that worker should try to get into the system, but that worker hadn’t done that yet.