Who Can See My Tax Information When I File?

Updated, 2:40 p.m. Tuesday

Every year, thousands of Bay Area families file their taxes for free at the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) in San Francisco. These clients include people who file taxes using an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) from the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, in the absence of a Social Security number.

Almost everyone who earns income in the United States is required to pay taxes, regardless of their immigration status. This includes millions of undocumented people who file their taxes — alongside American citizens and immigrants with work permits — in order to comply with federal tax law and potentially improve their chances of one day obtaining legal immigration status.

But this year, there’s one question that MEDA’s VP of family support and school-based services, Jaqueline Marcelos, said her staff is hearing more: How private is my tax information?

Lindsay Rojas, senior program manager with United Way Bay Area (UWBA), works with free tax sites like MEDA all over the region and said she’s been hearing the same concern, too: “Will my information be shared with other agencies?”

Marcelos attributes the anxiety she’s seeing from clients to President Donald Trump’s moves to target undocumented immigrants under his new administration. In February, the Washington Post reported that the Department of Homeland Security asked the IRS to provide the addresses and phone numbers of individuals who may be in the country without a legal immigration status — a request that the IRS ultimately rejected.

The tax agency has also been a target of the informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — led by billionaire Elon Musk — which reportedly showed up at the IRS headquarters last month in order to review agency operations. The IRS was able to block one of Musk’s DOGE aides from accessing individual taxpayer returns and other personal information.

But what laws are in place that establish how the IRS acts and who it shares information with? And can these rules hold off a president who has shown his determination to reshape how the federal government works? While the IRS did not reply to KQED’s multiple requests for comment, we spoke to multiple tax experts about current tax law to understand what legal mechanisms protect personal taxpayer data and recent actions by the IRS to protect this information.

What rules does the IRS have to follow?

When you submit information to the IRS, your tax return by law cannot be shared outside of the IRS, said Amy Spivey, professor and director of the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic at UC College of the Law in San Francisco.

“Historically, what that means is: the IRS is not permitted to share information about those who may be undocumented or without status here in the United States with other organizations like the Department of Homeland Security or ICE,” she said.

The IRS operates under the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), first established by Congress in 1939, which defines not just how the federal government collects taxes but also what it does with taxpayer data. Specifically, IRC Section 6103 establishes that “taxpayer information is extremely confidential,” said Josh Rosenthal, who leads the workers’ rights program at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco.

“Taxpayer information at the IRS can only be disclosed under extremely, extremely limited circumstances,” Rosenthal said, “mostly for the purposes of administering the tax system.”

Some of these exceptions the IRC provides do apply during certain investigations, like taxpayer audits, for example, when the IRS needs to update state tax agencies — such as California’s Franchise Tax Board — that there are changes to a taxpayer’s filing information, or in limited criminal investigations.

But there is no such exception for immigration enforcement “or other civil enforcement,” Rosenthal said — “and the exceptions that are there for criminal enforcement have substantial, procedural protection to make sure that taxpayer information is protected.”

And even if an individual IRS employee wanted to share taxpayer information, Rosenthal added, “it’s actually a crime for a federal employee to look at or disclose taxpayer information outside of those privacy protections.”

How do undocumented immigrants pay taxes?

The IRS started issuing ITINs in 1996 in order to improve tax collection, and since then, millions of people working in the U.S. have paid their taxes with an ITIN. Many people who use an ITIN to file are undocumented, although other groups may use an ITIN, too, including the spouses of workers legally authorized to work in the U.S. and international students. Requesting an ITIN from the IRS can be a complicated process that requires applicants to send their foreign passports, along with other personal information, to the tax agency.

According to a 2024 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. However, undocumented immigrants are barred from receiving Medicare or Social Security retirement benefits — despite contributing massively to these programs.

“Everybody who earns income in the United States is obligated to file taxes,” said Rosenthal from the Asian Law Caucus. “ITINs [recognize] that people are here across a range of immigration situations in order to build safe and healthy lives for themselves and for their families.”

However, at the start of the previous Trump administration, community tax clinics in the Bay Area reported a 20% decline in the number of people filing with ITINs. Staff working at these clinics told NPR in 2017 that their undocumented clients felt discouraged to file taxes when the federal government was making the path to citizenship much harder for them.

Could the Trump administration force the IRS to break the law?

Since his return to the White House, Trump and his allies have intervened in almost every corner of the federal government. Many of these actions have already been frozen by federal judges across the country, with legal scholars insisting that the administration has been acting against federal law and the U.S. Constitution.

The IRS has already been a target of the informal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk. Around 7,000 probationary IRS employees were laid off in February, and the Trump administration is now assessing budget cuts and additional layoffs that could ultimately result in the IRS reducing its workforce by up to 50%.

Against this backdrop, could Trump force the IRS to go against its own laws and disclose to other federal agencies the personal information of specific taxpayers — immigrant taxpayers using their ITINs, for example?

“One of the things that we’ve seen across the board with this administration is that they are acting erratically and chaotically,” said Rosenthal from the Asian Law Caucus — “and they’re trying to inspire confusion and fear, particularly among immigrant communities.”

He points out that many of these tax privacy protections were created in response to a previous American president who tried to weaponize the IRS: Richard Nixon. In 1973, members of the Nixon administration testified to Congress that they tried — and failed — to obtain from the IRS tax information about individuals that Nixon considered to be his enemies. Using the IRS as a political tool would later be one of the accusations Nixon faced from lawmakers who wanted to impeach him.

A few years later, Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1976, which established the privacy rules in the Internal Revenue Code 6103 and made it clear that tax returns are confidential information — not public documents the president can access when desired. On March 7, immigration advocacy groups based out of Chicago sued IRS leadership, arguing that Internal Revenue Code section 6103 “forbids Defendants from complying with requests — whether from the President, DHS, ICE, or a state — to share return or return information for purposes of immigration enforcement.”

Rosenthal said there is reason to believe that the IRS will protect its autonomy once again if challenged, just like agency employees pushed back against Nixon in the 1970s. “There are career staff in these agencies who … emphasize that everybody has the same obligation to pay taxes, and people who are doing that shouldn’t be made to fear because of their participation in the system,” he said.

When officials from DOGE showed up at the IRS headquarters last month in order to review agency operations, the IRS responded by asking for clear and written rules of what information DOGE would be able to access. The agreement reached between federal officials states that if DOGE employees were to look at any taxpayer returns, that information “shall only be provided if it is anonymized and in a manner that cannot be associated with, directly or indirectly, any taxpayer.”

The IRS did not reply to multiple requests from KQED to comment on this agreement.

“[Internal Revenue Code 6103] should be protecting the tax return information of those who are undocumented, for now,” said Spivey from UC Law. “Whether this will stay in place or whether it will be amended, that’s another question.”

Amid this uncertainty, if you are still nervous that filing taxes may complicate your immigration situation, every tax expert KQED spoke to recommends that you reach out to a legal services organization or a lawyer, with whom you can discuss your particular situation and make a decision that is best for you and your family.

“Every scenario is different … We cannot provide one statement for everybody,” said Marcelos from MEDA. “[Clients] need to check with their immigration lawyer.”

Read our guide on how to find a free or low-cost tax preparer near you.