Biden handed the IRS $80 billion and an army of 87,000 new agents pointed at taxpayers.
Now the country knows what some of those agents were doing with that power.
An internal investigation just caught 52 of them doing something that should get them all fired.
IRS Agents Made Unauthorized Access to Private Taxpayer Records of Celebrities and Government Officials
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report revealing that 52 IRS employees made 86 suspicious accesses into the private tax records of 30 different taxpayers between 2022 and 2025.
Those 30 taxpayers weren't random Americans pulled from a database.
They were government officials, business leaders, and entertainers – household names.
The Inspector General found the IRS's own watchdog program was failing to protect Americans from unauthorized snooping by its own agents.
Investigators found 22 employees who broke federal law and kept their jobs.
The IRS also left 175 victims in the dark – taxpayers whose records had been accessed never received notice it happened.
Another 101 were never notified at all – because the agents responsible simply retired or resigned before anyone got around to disciplining them.
Walk out the door, and the case dies.
Between 2012 and 2021, the agency completed 1,694 investigations into unauthorized access by its own employees – and confirmed violations in 27 percent of them.
The IRS has known about this for over a decade and done nothing to fix it.
And Congress rewarded that agency anyway – handing it $80 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act.
IRS Employees Owe Millions in Back Taxes and the Agency Keeps Letting Them Walk
The same agency that kept 22 agents on the payroll after they broke federal law is the same agency that can't get its own employees to pay their taxes.
A July 2026 watchdog report found that more than 5,800 IRS employees and contractors owed nearly $50 million in overdue taxes.
Of those, 2,044 employees owed more than $12 million in back taxes – and 860 of them still haven't paid.
Of the 70 employees who willfully refused to file their tax returns – the most serious category – only 20 were fired.
"Every single tax-dodging tax collector needs to be shown the door," said Sen. Joni Ernst.
Ernst's Audit the IRS Act would require annual tax audits of all agency employees and ban the IRS from hiring anyone with unpaid tax debt.
The bill is sitting in the Senate while the IRS keeps these employees on the payroll.
The agency that garnishes wages, freezes bank accounts, and destroys credit scores over underpayments lets its own employees skip out on their bills without consequence.
That is not bureaucratic oversight – that is an institution that has decided the law applies to Americans, not to itself.
Biden and Chuck Schumer built this.
Through the Inflation Reduction Act, they handed the IRS 87,000 new agents and sold it as going after wealthy tax cheats.
The IRS employee union, which donates 99 percent of its political contributions to Democrats, wasn't building an army of auditors to come after its own members – it was building a weapon pointed at taxpayers.
Obama's IRS targeted conservative groups – the American Center for Law and Justice took them to court and won.
Biden didn't clean that agency up – he poured more money into it.
The Charles Littlejohn case should have changed the culture inside the IRS.
Littlejohn was the IRS contractor who illegally leaked Donald Trump's private tax records to The New York Times and ProPublica, and he got five years in prison.
The same Inspector General that exposed Littlejohn is now finding 52 more employees committing the same class of crime – unauthorized access to confidential taxpayer records – and keeping their jobs.
Miss a payment deadline and the IRS comes for everything.
An IRS agent rifles through the private financial records of a sitting government official who was never under investigation – and walks away with the job, the pension, and full access to confidential files.
Biden gave these people a mandate to go after the wealthy.
Instead, agents went through the wealthy's private records without authorization – and 22 of them still have their jobs.
Sources:
- Spencer Lombardo, "Dozens Of IRS Employees Snooped Through Celebrities, Other High-Profile Taxpayers' Private Records, IG Report Finds," Daily Caller, October 4, 2026.
- "Over 800 IRS employees owe millions in back taxes after audits pushed by Ernst," Washington Examiner, September 14, 2026.
- "Comer Launches Investigation into Billions in Unpaid Taxes Owed by Federal Employees," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, June 2026.
- "IRS left sensitive taxpayer info vulnerable to leaks, Inspector General finds," Fox Business, 2023.