IRS employees accessed tax files of officials and celebrities in unauthorized sweep

A recent TIGTA investigation uncovered 86 “suspicious accesses” by 52 IRS workers into the tax files of 30 high-profile taxpayers from 2022 through 2025, covering U.S. officials, corporate executives and entertainers. The report criticized the agency’s unauthorized-access (UNAX) program as insufficient, noting that 22 employees faced no termination and that the IRS failed to inform 175 affected taxpayers in a timely manner, with an additional 101 left uninformed because the responsible staff left before discipline could be applied.

TIGTA proposed eight corrective actions, including reducing access to sensitive codes and strengthening victim-notification guidance; the IRS’s acting chief privacy officer John Walker accepted seven of them and plans to act by December 2026, while rejecting a new timeliness standard for notifications. The findings follow President Donald Trump’s dropped $10 billion lawsuit over alleged leaks of his 2019 tax returns, and the earlier conviction of former contractor Charles Littlejohn for leaking Trump’s records.