A “mega API” could potentially allow a person who has access to the export of all IRS data to the systems of their choice, including private entities. If this person also had access to other interoperable data sets in separate government agencies, they could compare them to IRS data for their own ends.
“Schematize this data and the understanding that would take years,” an IRS source in Wired told. “The simple fact of thinking about the data would take a long time, because these people have no experience, not only in government, but in IRS or with taxes or anything else.” (“There are a lot of things I don’t know that I learn now,” Corcos told Ingraham in Fox’s interview. “I know a lot about software systems, that’s why I was brought.”)
These systems have all followed a tedious approval process to ensure the security of taxpayers’ data. Anything that can replace them would probably still need to be properly verified, the sources indicate Wired.
“It is essentially an open door controlled by musk for all the most sensitive information of American without any of the rules which normally guarantee this data”, according to an IRS worker.
The data consolidation effort aligns with President Donald Trump executive decree From March 20, which ordered agencies to eliminate information silos. Although the order is allegedly referred to to fight against fraud and waste, it could also threaten privacy by consolidating personal data hosted on different systems in a central benchmark, Wired reported.
The IRS, Palant, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
In February, a service note was drawn up to provide Kliger with access to personal data from taxpayers at IRS, The Washington Post reported. Kliger finally received reading access alone to anonymized tax data, similar to what academics use for research. A few weeks later, the Corcos have arrived, demanding detailed information on taxpayers and suppliers as a means of fighting fraud, Depending on the post.
“The IRS has a fairly inherited infrastructure. It is actually very similar to what banks have used. It is the old mainframes who execute the cobol and the assembly and the challenge was, how to migrate this to a modern system? ” Corcos told Ingraham in the same interview with Fox News. Corcos said he was planning to continue his work at IRS for a total of six months.
DOGE has already reduced and burned modernization projects in other agencies, replacing them with smaller teams and tighter deadlines. At the Social Security Administration, the representatives of DOGE plan to move all the agency data on the programming languages inherited like Cobol and in something like Java, Wired reported last week.
Last Friday, DOGE suddenly placed around 50 IRS technologists on administrative leave. On Thursday, even more technologists were cut, including the Director of Architecture and the implementation of cybersecurity, the Deputy Director of Information Security and the acting director of security risk management. IRS technology director Kaschit Pandya is one of the few technology officials at the agency, according to sources.
DOGE expected the API project to take a year, according to several sources of the IRS, but that the calendar has considerably shortened a few weeks. “It is not only technically possible, it is not a reasonable idea either, which will paralyze the IRS,” said an employee of the IRS in Wired. “It is also important to endanger the season of deposit next year, because obviously all these other systems which they distance people are important.”
