By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Dozens of IRS employees went digging through the private tax files of the famous and powerful, and the agency often never told the victims.

A Treasury watchdog found that IRS employees ran dozens of suspicious searches of the tax records of government officials, business leaders, and celebrities, and that the agency cannot reliably detect or prevent the snooping. For anyone who files a return, it is a reminder that the most sensitive financial file the government keeps on you is not as locked as you think.

The IRS holds the income, assets, and financial secrets of every American, backed by a promise that only authorized eyes ever see them. A watchdog just documented that the promise is porous, that the snoops are rarely fired, and that the people whose files were opened are usually left in the dark.

What the watchdog found

The numbers are not small. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration flagged 86 suspicious accesses by 52 IRS employees into the accounts of 30 high-profile taxpayers from 2022 through 2025 (SOURCE HERE).

Many snoopers kept their jobs. Of the employees who accessed records without authorization, 22 were not terminated (SOURCE HERE), undercutting the agency’s claim of a zero-tolerance policy.

Victims were kept in the dark. The IRS failed to notify 175 affected taxpayers because of procedural failures, plus 101 more where the employee resigned or retired before discipline, 276 people in all (SOURCE HERE).

The fine print

• IRS cannot see it coming. The watchdog found the IRS has no mechanism to systemically detect employees browsing the files of celebrities and public figures (SOURCE HERE).
• A fix is slow and contested. The report made 8 recommendations, and the IRS disagreed with the one requiring timely notification of victims, claiming adequate standards already exist (SOURCE HERE), and corrective action is not due until December 2026.
• This is not the first breach. It follows the 2021 leak of thousands of wealthy Americans’ returns by an IRS contractor later sentenced to five years in prison (SOURCE HERE).

In Their Own Words

“The IRS does not have a mechanism to prevent or systemically detect browsing of celebrities (SOURCE HERE),” the Treasury watchdog concluded, a line that should unsettle every taxpayer, famous or not.

What The Other Side Is Doing And How To Neutralize It

This is the same agency whose official leaked thousands of wealthy Americans’ returns to the press in 2021, and the same agency that in 2013 was caught singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny under Lois Lerner.

Each time, the institutional left’s response has been not to shrink the IRS but to grow it, pouring tens of billions into more agents and more data collection on the theory that a bigger tax agency is a fairer one. This report is the counterargument in black and white: an agency that cannot stop its own employees from reading a celebrity’s return is not an agency that should be handed more of everyone’s financial life.

To turn outrage into accountability, back the groups that actually litigate and legislate on this. Learn more from the National Taxpayers Union, which publishes detailed IRS-reform and taxpayer-privacy recommendations (VISIT HERE), and from Americans for Tax Reform, which runs an active beat tracking IRS abuses and the fight over the agency’s funding (VISIT HERE). For readers who want the litigation edge, the Cause of Action Institute sues the IRS over improper disclosures and records denials and is the shop that forces documents into the daylight (VISIT HERE).

What the media misses

Every American makes a quiet bargain with the IRS: hand over the most intimate financial details of your life, and trust that the clerk on the other end looks only when the law allows.

This report is the sound of that bargain cracking. Fifty-two employees went poking into the files of the famous and the powerful, most kept their jobs, and hundreds of victims were never even told. The instinct on the left will be to treat this as a management hiccup fixable with more funding, but that gets it exactly backward.

The problem is not that the IRS is too small to watch itself; it is that an agency this large, holding this much, has grown beyond its own ability to police who looks at what. Conservatives have warned for years that concentrating financial power in one unaccountable bureaucracy invites exactly this.

A bored clerk’s curiosity is a small thing. An agency that cannot detect or stop it is not.

Facts are prickly things,

-The Editors

Politics · Upstream of the Swamp · October 6, 2026

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