Special Notice: DOGE is Now Going After the IRS Which Means I Need Former and Current IRS Sources, Especially COBOL Programmers
Notes on the Crises pivoted on February 1st into around the clock coverage of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025. Today is Day Twenty
Read Part 0, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 & Part 9
If you are a current or former career Internal Revenue Service or Bureau of the Fiscal Service Employee and especially if you are a COBOL programmer, contact me over email or over signal (a secure and encrypted text messaging app) — linked here. My Signal username is “NathanTankus.01”. I would also like Legal counsel sources from the Treasury and Federal Reserve as well as payments level sources at the Federal Reserve. I am also looking for sources at FINCEN. Finally If you work at any Administrative Agency and have knowledge of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service directly stopping payments your agency has authorized, please get in touch.
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Hello readers, this isn’t going to be a full piece today. This is more or less staking out my desire for sources about the Internal Revenue Service.
The context is that the early reporting on the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025 had concerning signs of what was to come. Specifically, I’ve been keeping in the back of my mind this tidbit from the New York Times January 31st reporting:
Mr. Akis has made similar inquiries at the I.R.S. about its information technology as part of an effort to automate tax collection, according to people familiar with the matter
Thus I was concerned from the beginning that they were also targeting IRS systems. However, I already had so much to do with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and found that more immediately and desperately concerning that I didn’t feel either prepared or capable to also take on this issue.
Now however, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service issues still remain a grave, large and constitutional concern but developments have slowed down somewhat. Meanwhile DOGE’s interest in the IRS has gone from a tangential mention that could be seen at the very periphery of mainstream reporting to a major focus of current reporting. Specifically Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein in the Washington Post published an article on Monday headlined “Musk’s DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS”.
The article states:
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS is considering a memorandum of understanding that would give officials from DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records
So here we are again. For those who read the early reporting about the Bureau of the Fiscal Service this will all be eerily familiar. This time the “David Lebryk” is IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell though it remains to be seen if he’ll resign. Social Security Commissioner Michelle King has already “Lebryked” and resigned in protest of DOGE’s desire to access Social Security data. The story at IRS in broad details is following all the same patterns of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, and really what we are seeing across the Federal Government. From the Washington Post reporting:
“But it’s highly unusual to grant political appointees access to personal taxpayer data, or even programs adjacent to that data, experts say. IRS commissioners traditionally do not have IDRS access. The same goes for the national taxpayer advocate, the agency’s internal consumer watchdog, according to Nina Olson, who served in the role from 2001 to 2019.”
So here we are. It will shock nobody that there is already a lawsuit challenging DOGE access to the IRS.
So that’s the state of play. I want to have more to say about this, but to do so I need sources. IRS systems are something I know a lot less about than the Bureau of the Fiscal Service systems and at first glance, the IRS systems seem far more complicated. It's also not clear to me at this stage how much of that complexity is driven by the IRS’s even more extreme budgetary starvation which has inhibited it going through IT modernization, even the extent of IT modernization the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has experienced. There are also good reasons to believe that the complexity is driven by the fact that taxation is far more complex and has much more involved and dense “business logic” than even BFS systems.
In short, I need to know more about the Internal Revenue Service to feel comfortable doing the kind of dense reporting I’ve done for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. If you are a former or current IRS employee please contact me over email, or securely over the encrypted text messaging app Signal. My username on Signal is NathanTankus.01. If you have relatives or friends at the IRS, please encourage them to get in touch. Thank you very much.