Monday, July 28, 2025 - The IRS is trying to modernize a more than 50-year-old IT system that’s critical to its work every filing season.
Internal documents obtained by Federal News Network show
the agency is working on a “future state” of its Integrated Data Retrieval
System (IDRS), a massive clearinghouse of taxpayer data.
IDRS allows IRS employees to review an individual’s tax
information when they call asking for help, or send tax notices to individuals.
The system also makes it possible for taxpayers to track the status of their
federal tax return refund check.
The IRS expects that this modernization project, once
complete, will make it much easier for employees to retrieve a taxpayer’s
records when they contact the agency asking for help.
Delivering on this goal would be a long-awaited win for the
agency, which has some of the oldest legacy IT systems in the federal
government and has struggled to get the funding and staffing necessary to
complete this project.
However, the project also comes at a time when the IRS is
sharing its sensitive data with officials from the Department of Government
Efficiency (DOGE) and immigration officials at the Department of Homeland
Security — unusual decisions for an agency with strict policies restricting
data sharing.
The New York Times reported in May that multiple
agencies, including DHS and the IRS, are working with the tech company Palantir
to create a massive interagency database. Wired reported in April that
Palantir is working with DOGE in building a new “mega-API” for accessing IRS
records.
Former acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause stepped
down from the agency in April, following the agency’s data-sharing
agreement with the DHS to support the Trump administration’s efforts to deport
undocumented immigrants.
Officials from the Department of Government Efficiency also
have access to IDRS. There are at least 15 ongoing federal lawsuits challenging
DOGE’s access to sensitive data at the IRS and across many other agencies.
Courtney Bowman, global director for privacy and civil
liberties at Palantir, denied that the company has any role in developing a
“master list” of data from multiple agencies.
“Just to clear the air on this topic, Palantir is not
building a master list across federal agencies. We don’t have contracts with
DOGE. We haven’t been asked to build this type of cross-agency information
system,” Bowman said in a July 16 panel discussion hosted by the American
Enterprise Institute.
It’s not entirely clear how far along the IRS is in
modernizing its legacy IDRS system, or who will have access to its data. The
Treasury Department and IRS did not respond to requests for comment.
Internal documents show the IRS plans to merge several of
its systems, including those that handle the processing of tax returns for
individuals and businesses “into one tax processing engine.”
Internal documents show a modernized IDRS will allow for
“national real-time tax processing,” and that the agency will be able to
“establish processes to intercept or claw back erroneous payments.”
The IRS, according to these internal documents, plans to
“decommission” legacy mainframe systems once the migration is complete and
retire legacy applications “once modern processes replicate the legacy
outputs.”
Former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told Federal News
Network that IDRS modernization was in the works under his leadership as part
of Taxpayer 360, “an effort to pull all information for customer service agents
at their fingertips on a single plan so that when helping a taxpayer, they
don’t need to ping multiple system and look across many screens to get a clear
picture.”
Werfel said the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget
request indicates IDRS modernization remains a “priority” for the IRS.
The internal documents show the IRS is working with several
tech companies on this project, including Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and
Palantir.
Bowman said Palantir is working with the IRS on a “unified
API” that will make it easier for the agency to help taxpayers.
“The IRS and part of their processing tax returns is working
across a multitude of different systems that are not currently interoperable.
And so, in order for a customer service representative within the IRS to get
the information that they need, in order to be responsive to a taxpayer’s
request, they have to swivel between 10 or 15 different systems and then munge
all of that information together in a Word document or an Excel document, and
then they have all these random information sources floating around,” he said.
Bowman said Palantir is helping the IRS “execute on
something that the public assumes they’re already doing.”
“We think that our law enforcement and our federal agencies
are operating in highly sophisticated digital technology environments, but
they’re not. They’re oftentimes still working with mainframe green screen
systems from the 1970s and 1980s, and part of the modernization effort is just
getting to a base level of information that presumably these institutions and
their agents should already have access to,” he added.
The IRS has strict controls over who has access to
IDRS. Agency guidance states, “IDRS users are authorized to access only those
accounts required to accomplish their official duties.”
The IRS prohibits employees with IDRS access from looking up
their own taxpayer account, or those of their spouse, friends, co-workers, “or
any account in which they have a personal or financial interest.”
Werfel, during the AEI panel, said “the law is set up so
that the default for the IRS is you are not allowed to share people’s taxpayer
data outside this agency.”
“There may be good reasons to bring data together, and we
shouldn’t take a decade to decide it, but we also shouldn’t do it without
public engagement,” Werfel said, adding that transparency is needed to “make
sure everyone has a substantive understanding of what the risks are.”
“If those risks are understood, then the federal agencies
involved can put in mitigators to address those risks right now, we’re moving
so quickly that we don’t even understand yet the full nature of the risks, and
certainly nobody should have any confidence that we’re putting in mitigators if
we don’t really understand the full extent of the risks,” Werfel said.
Alex Gibbons, CEO of the Center for Democracy and
Technology, raised concerns over DHS “having an unprecedented agreement with
the IRS to access taxpayer records for immigration enforcement purposes.”
“We’ve been gravely concerned by recent trends under the
Trump administration to access and consolidate data in new ways, often breaking
established laws and well-established norms that protect people’s data and keep
it siloed and protected for specific and intentional reasons,” Gibbons said.
In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive
order calling on agencies to remove “unnecessary barriers” to share data
across the federal government.
Gibbons said these data-sharing decisions are being made
largely without the consultation of privacy and civil liberties officials,
inspectors general and technical staff who have left or been fired from
agencies “right at a time when we need them most.”
Werfel said widely sharing large volumes of IRS data also
raises cybersecurity concerns.
“It gets attacked all the time, and it is extraordinarily
sophisticated, super resilient, and it’s an impressive group of people that are
protecting your IRS data. But what if that IRS data moves to a different
environment, en masse?” he said. “My point is that as we are bringing data
together, we have to do it thoughtfully.”
IDRS has been running since 1973, according to the
Government Accountability Office. IDRS runs on COBOL, and the IRS is having
problems finding employees who know how to work in this outdated programming
language.
GAO found in June 2018 that the IRS faced a
shortage of 20 developers required to modernize IDRS, and identified 10 “single
points of failure,” meaning only a single employee was available to support
some of its functions.
IRS officials told GAO that the attrition of staff may
result in a delay in updating systems to reflect tax law changes and could
result in an “inability to complete critical IDRS project activities on time.”
GAO wrote that the IRS faces “significant risks due to their
reliance on legacy programming languages, outdated hardware, and a shortage of
human resources with critical skills.”
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