DOGE wants access to your tax data. Why?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sparked alarm over the weekend, when a senior DOGE official requested access to the Internal Revenue System’s detailed database featuring financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.
Host Martine Powers speaks with economics correspondent Jacob Bogage about how this could affect millions of American taxpayers.
Today’s show was produced by Ariel Plotnick, with help from Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Reena Flores and mixed by Sam Bair. Thanks also to Mike Madden.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Millions of Americans are preparing to file their taxes by the April 15th deadline. |
| 0:06.9 | Meanwhile, there is something going on at the IRS. |
| 0:13.1 | The IRS keeps detailed financial information about every taxpayer in the country, every business, every nonprofit. |
| 0:21.7 | That information all lives in a highly guarded internal system. |
| 0:26.5 | And Elon Musk's U.S. Doge Service is trying to get access to it. |
| 0:34.3 | From the Newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post reports. |
| 0:38.1 | I'm Martine Powers. |
| 0:39.7 | It's Tuesday, February 18th. |
| 0:42.5 | Today, Doge is targeting the Internal Revenue Service. |
| 0:46.5 | My colleague, Jacob Bogage, is an economics correspondent for the Post, |
| 0:50.5 | and he'll explain what this news could mean for millions of American taxpayers and their sensitive data. |
| 1:04.4 | Okay, so Jacob, I want you to start by explaining a little bit more about this database that Doge is hoping to access. |
| 1:11.7 | Like, what is it? |
| 1:14.1 | When we talk about IRS databases, let's reset a little bit. |
| 1:20.7 | We're not talking about one database. |
| 1:22.9 | We're talking about 60 databases. |
| 1:25.8 | And they all feed into this one system called the integrated data |
| 1:31.0 | retrieval system or IDRS. The purpose of that is so that when I call the IRS with a question |
| 1:38.3 | about my tax return or my business as taxes, whoever is on the line can go into IDRS and pull that data up, |
| 1:47.6 | and it all feeds on the one screen. |
| 1:50.1 | My bank information, my tax balances, my refund, everything is there in front of them. |
| 1:58.1 | It is an incredibly rich data set, and it's considered the |
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