Very Disturbing Move by the IRS

Under the Biden Administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) wants to “improve” your taxpayer experience by requiring your biometric information. Beginning in June, if you want to receive your taxpayer information, then you will have to submit a “selfie” through a private contractor for facial recognition.

This is an agency that we’ve already gone to court over after they were caught targeting conservatives, and we put a court order into place to forbid this practice. This is also an agency that still uses fax machines to communicate instead of more modern methods like email. Not to mention, the IRS had at the end of last filing season more than 35 million total unprocessed returns. How could they handle this technology? The IRS is the last agency that the American people would want to have this confidential biometric information.

There has already been extreme pushback from both sides of the aisle like we’ve never seen before. Democrat Congressman Ted Lieu expressed his concern:

"This is a very, very bad idea by the IRS. It will further weaken Americans’ privacy. . . . The IRS needs to reverse this Big Brother tactic, now."

Another Democrat Senator echoed this concern. Senator Ron Wyden tweeted:

"I’m very disturbed that Americans may have to submit to a facial recognition system, wait on hold for hours, or both, to access personal data on the IRS website. While e-filing returns remain unaffected, I’m pushing the IRS for greater transparency on this plan."

In an interview on Fox, Republican Senator Rick Scott explained the dangers of this:

"I’ve heard from so many people in my state that said, oh I am supposed to get a refund, but I had to get on there, I had to give . . . facial recognition. This is Big Brother. By the way, this is the same IRS that got hacked a few years ago and millions of millions of millions of people’s personal data was released. Number one, the government . . . shouldn’t be doing this. Number two, you know that it’s going to get hacked. There is no confidentiality. I’m surprised . . . Biden probably has a Chinese company doing it."

Because of the support of our ACLJ members, our office of government accountability is already taking action. The IRS out of all agencies cannot be trusted with our biometric data, and we will fight in court and in Congress to make sure that does not happen.